Odds are, there’s a powerful camera in your pocket right now. As camera technology evolved to fit on a cell phone, sharing photos with family and friends has become more widespread than ever. And while the standard camera app on a smartphone can help capture those memories worth sharing, here are a few apps that can enhance the experience.
Instagram iOS, Android Price: Free Without a doubt, Instagram is the most popular standalone photo-sharing application on the market. It’s actually so popular, Facebook decided to buy it in April for $1 billion. The app centers around adding filters to pictures to give them a “film” quality or more professional look. There are 18 different filters, the ability to add “tilt-shift” effects which blur certain parts of the picture and a quick-fix contrast button that enhances colors and shadows.
Users can “follow” friends and “like” and comment on their pictures. Plus, Instagram can instantly share the photos to other social media networks like Facebook and Twitter. Instagram is genuinely fun to use. It only takes a few seconds to snap a picture, choose a filter and upload it, and there’s a small sense of satisfaction when receiving a notification that someone “liked” a picture. It’s definitely the best in terms of social integration.
Facebook Camera iOS Price: Free Remember how Facebook bought Instagram for $1 billion? Despite that, they released Facebook Camera one month after purchasing Instagram.
Much like Facebook Messenger, Facebook Camera is a standalone app that supports one of Facebook’s core services. Instead of a news feed filled with pointless FarmVille posts or otherwise boring status updates, it’s filled with pictures from friends.
Individual pictures can be edited and touched up with filters strangely similar to Instagram’s.
But the best thing about this app is the ease of uploading multiple pictures.
Instead of refreshing the feed like in the normal Facebook app, swiping down from the top of the screen shows an entire camera roll, where you can select multiple pictures to upload into an album. It’s a very easy way to document an entire event all from your phone.
It’s unclear why Facebook would release an Instagram clone right after buying Instagram, but the app does actually work and could prove valuable to the social photographer on-the-go. It’s hampered by slow loading times, but those can be overlooked.
Pudding Camera iOS, Android Price: Free Pudding Camera combines standard effect filters – like black and white, sepia and vivid – with nine quirky cameras. It’s possible to use different cameras with different filter “films” for interesting combinations.
For example, using the Triplex camera and Vignetting film takes three pictures and arranges them as a single shot, all while darkening the edges of the frame. There’s also a panoramic camera for super wide shots, a Motion x4 camera that strings parts of four pictures into a single image and a “fantasy” camera that gives everything a dreamy look.
Unfortunately, the app is clunky to use and intense effects, like fish-eye, look terrible. But the potential creativity that can come from combining cameras and film in Pudding Camera and then editing those pictures in a different app is enticing. Pudding Camera is worth a download, but it probably won’t be the only one to take pictures with on a phone.
On the other hand, this next app will be.
Camera+ iOS Price: $0.99 (Sale) Using Camera+ is like turning your iPhone into a professional DSLR. That’s only a slight exaggeration: Camera+ gives users the ultimate level of precision and control. There are four different shooting modes – Normal, Stabilizer, Timer and Burst (shoot multiple pictures in a row at a lower resolution.) Stabilizer is especially impressive and makes close-ups and otherwise blurry situations clearer.
There’s also separate autofocus and exposure – meaning it’s possible to focus on the subject of a picture but set the exposure to, for example, the background, giving the photograph more balance in terms of light and shadows. However, Camera+’s copious quick-fix buttons almost make that unnecessary. Once the picture is taken, there are several quick-fix buttons and scene modes – like Clarity, which instantly makes the shot better – and more than 30 filters to give a picture that hipster-fied, vintage feel. After all that editing, the pictures can be shared through text, email or across social media.
It’s impossible to overstate how awesome this app is. It’s basic enough to be user-friendly but has enough manual controls to satisfy avid photographers. Camera+ is one of the best camera apps on the market.
 
____ Contact Taylor Balkom at [email protected]