10 iPhone Apps That Add Extra Flair to Shutterbugs’ Photos

by Nathan Eddy

Through the app’s gesture-based interface you can shoot and share photos in any aspect ratio, browse and organize all of your shared streams and photo albums, or get creative with a huge selection of hilarious photo filters and face effects, which allow you to make 80-year-old friends, add beards, grow mustaches or even go bald. A series of canvas effects, paint textures and other filters give you license to expand your creative side.

Inspired by such pointillist painters as Georges Seurat and Paul Signac, PixelWakker breaks down your pixels into art. The app includes six effects, such as Sixty Four; an old school pixilation feature with large pixels and limited color depth; and, for a more modern aesthetic, Circuit Board, where pixels trace the nearest adjacent color to form a circuit board image.

If you’re OK with putting your work into the hands of a wider creative community, this app lets you upload a photo so artists around the world can draw you. You can also browse the Sktchy photo gallery for people to draw, or discover more than 30,000 original artworks and swipe right on any artwork to view the photo that inspired it. It’s also a great recommendation for friends who work as illustrators—it may be free, but knowledge can be the greatest gift of all.

Boasting more than 300 million users, Instagram is a great way to spread your memories to friends, family and the larger community with panache. You can customize your photos and videos with one of several custom-built filter effects, while instant sharing to Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, Tumblr and Foursquare lets you cover all your social media bases. There’s also an option to let you send individual friends specific photos, if you want to share a more personal memory.

Use popular Photoshop features, such as layers, selection tools, adjustments and filters, to create stunning shots, or create something otherworldly using painting effects, filter brushes and other effects. Even better, you can start a project on your iPhone or iPod Touch and finish it on your iPad or back in Photoshop at home using a free membership to Adobe Creative Cloud. You can also work on high-resolution images while maintaining the highest image quality with support for images of up to 12 megapixels.

If professional photographers and graphic designers constantly Photoshop models to perfection, why shouldn’t you? This app lets you retouch and add artistic flair to selfies and portraits with ease, smoothing out wrinkles, reducing blemishes or polishing up those (now) pearly whites. Customizable filters can be applied to the entire photo or to specific areas, and social media and email connectivity allows friends and family to see the new and improved you.

Not many people send postcards anymore—the thought of licking stamps and finding mailboxes seems so quaint. Still, there’s nothing like getting one in the mail, which is why Postino—which allows you to send real, physical postcards featuring your own photos—is such a joy. Type a personal message, add a digital signature, fill in the address and click “send.” It’s that simple.

The simple six-step process means you just take or choose a photo, trace the outline of the subject, pick a theme in your favorite color, select a filter, add stickers or text in a range of colors, then save and share with your friends. The app also supports Instagram, Facebook, Twitter and Flickr, and more than 70 modifiable retro stickers, 18 retro themes and 17 colors mean you won’t soon run out of creative ideas.

Underground dance-pop indie darling Goldfrapp released a nifty app in support of the release of its latest album, which lets you combine photos to create unexpected and sometimes surreal images. In addition, built-in filters such as enhance, tone, color and order allow you to further adjust the image, and one super-fun feature lets you shake your iPhone to randomly select images from your library and remix your memories, to often bizarre results.

An ideal app for creating holiday mischief, Cut Me In lets you cut out friends and family and move them to strange and hilarious places. Aunt Flo can’t make Christmas this year? Photochop her stealing presents from under the tree! Use the Photo Chop Background Adjuster to superimpose your images. The app offers a wide range of backgrounds and other features. You can also superimpose your face on famous photos to cause added mischief.