Best Photo Editing Apps for iPhone in 2024 (free and paid)⏱️ 4 min read

Photo Editing Apps for iPhone

Despite the excellent photos that your iPhone can capture, photo editing can help you make them even better. Many apps let you edit your photos like a pro quickly and easily. You can enhance your photography skills and give your photos the final touches with the help of these apps. The following list includes some of the best photo editing apps for iPhone.

1. Adobe Lightroom: Make your own presence felt

Lightroom is one of the top photo editing apps available for iPhones. You can take and edit beautiful images with its user-friendly interface and strong editing tools. It also provides an AI adaptive preset feature that suggests presets to edit your photos.

The editing app also lets you create and save your own presets for a customized editing process. It offers an extensive set of photo editing tools that enable you to enhance your images with the auto photo editor and precisely alter lighting parameters like contrast, exposure, highlights, and shadows using sliders.

While the color mixer and color grading tools allow you to edit creatively, the photo enhancer tool allows you to change your photos’ clarity, texture, and grain. The app is supported by Adobe, one of the most recognizable brands on the market, and has a broad selection of presets, filters, and premium presets.

Lightroom also offers a Premium membership for those looking for sophisticated features and an easy editing process. The Healing Brush in the tool can be used to remove objects, exclusive presets, masking, geometry adjustments, cloud storage, and many other tools, which are made available after upgrading to Premium.

You can explore the magic of photo editing by clicking the download button below.

Pros

  • The video editing feature is also available
  • Available in multiple languages
  • Easy-to-use interface
  • Photos are synced to cloud storage and can be accessed on other devices

Cons

  • Limited sharing options

Pricing: Free to download (Monthly Premium (40GB) starts at $1.99)

2. Pixelmator: Give your iPhone editing an artistic feel

Pixelmator is one of the best choices when looking for a photo editing app designed exclusively for iOS devices. The tool offers you a plethora of cutting-edge and potent tools leveraging the most recent features and technologies.

The photo editing app offers various artist-designed brushes and painting techniques. It also includes lifelike watercolor and crayon effects for those who enjoy painting and sketching on their iPhones. Even a custom-made Pixel brush is included for making pixel art.

With features like double-texture brush technology and variable stroke speed, you can achieve incredible detail and control over your strokes. The app’s Apple Pencil optimization produces a natural and intuitive drawing experience, including palm rejection, pressure sensitivity, tilt recognition, and acceleration sensitivity.

When editing and enhancing photos, the app offers a variety of tools, including templates with exquisite design, fine control over the tonal range with levels and curves, and features for color correction and white balance adjustments. With the help of the Repair and Clone tools, you can also eliminate flaws, blemishes, and unwanted items.

Last but not least, the app makes exporting and sharing pictures simple. By changing the settings for quality, color depth, and size, users can optimize images for the web.

Pros

  • Light weighted
  • Supports editing with Apple Pencil
  • Beginners friendly

Cons

  • Can’t edit large batches of photos
  • Sluggish at times

Pricing: $9.99

3. VSCO: Adjust your best shots with simple taps

VSCO is one of the leading iPhone photo editing apps, offering you a creative platform to express yourself. It offers an immersive editing experience that elevates your photography with various potent photo and video editing tools.

The app also comes with 10 free presets to improve your photos, letting you change the contrast, saturation, and texture for a distinctive appearance. Furthermore, you can experiment with cropping, skewing, and saving your favorite edits with Recipes to ensure you can easily recreate your preferred styles.

Additionally, the tool has a membership option that grants you access to more than 200 presets, including vintage film looks influenced by well-known brands. This membership makes advanced tools like Split Tone and HSL available, giving you greater control over the colors in your images.

The software’s features have been expanded beyond just photo editing to include video editing. VSCO lets you transform your videos using the same high-end presets and sophisticated editing tools that are available for photos.

You can experiment with color management using HSL, change the white balance, and even use DSCO to make brief video GIFs. It is a comprehensive tool for visual storytelling thanks to its video editing features, which let users improve their videos with high-quality adjustments and effects.

VSCO also offers a free 7-day membership trial, which you can use to get started. You will be billed an annual subscription fee once the trial period has ended.

Pros

  • Offers 7 days free trial
  • Simple but attractive design
  • Excellent tools for exposure and color editing

Cons

  • The majority of filters need a paid account
  • No support for dark mode

Pricing: Free to download (Monthly Plus starts at $7.99)

4. Afterlight: Your iPhone photo editing buddy

With over 130 unique filters created by photographers, Afterlight is a photo editing app for iPhone that ensures you’ll always find the perfect pairing for your photos. You won’t need to look elsewhere for additional filter options because the vast filter library is continually growing.

It offers more than 20 sophisticated tools, including touch gestures, advanced curves, selective hue/saturation/lightness, overlays/gradients, and grain, to help you enhance colors, tweak hues, or play with lightness. It offers all the required editing tools to give your photos a polished appearance.

The app’s collection of more than 60 textures and overlays is one of its standout features. You can give your photos a distinctive and artistic finishing touch by using authentic light leaks made from actual 35mm film, real-world dust textures, and film emulation techniques like shifting RGB channels and double exposure effects.

You can also add borders and frames to your edited images using the app’s frame and border features. Afterlight offers customization options to make your photos truly stand out, whether you prefer a preset color or want to use your own image as the background.

You have the option to choose an Afterlight membership as an Afterlight user. A 7-day free trial period is available, and subscriptions can be billed monthly or annually. After the trial period, your Apple ID account will be charged an annual subscription fee.

Pros

  • A large selection of tools available
  • It can be used offline
  • There are 78 available textures

Cons

  • Applying effects requires time
  • Zooming is not possible
  • Unable to compare the edit to the original

Pricing: Free to download (Monthly Afterlight Membership starts at $2.99)

5. Darkroom: The easy photo editing apps for iPhone

Even though Darkroom is the last app on our list, it is a high-quality professional app for iPhone that is made to offer a powerful and intuitive experience for photo and video editing. The editing tool offers a variety of features, allowing you to express your creativity and edit photos expertly.

You can create 3D maps of your scenes and isolate particular elements, such as the sky, hair, or skin, in your photographs using AI-powered depth editing and smart object detection. With a complete set of editing tools, it stands out as a top substitute for Adobe Lightroom and other photography tools.

Darkroom’s ability to create distinct presets using the same equipment as professional photographers is one of its best qualities. Editing photos is made simple with the app’s touch-friendly curves and selective color tools, setting it apart from its rivals.

Additionally, it offers a high-quality editing experience by enabling you to edit RAW photos at full resolution with 16 bits of color depth. It is a perfect substitute for video editing programs like CapCut and InShot because it also has impressive video editing features like real-time playback and 4K video color grading.

Darkroom excels at providing users with a thorough album management suite to organize their photo library efficiently. With a built-in hashtag manager and Siri shortcuts feature, it makes hashtag creation and exportation simpler.

Pros

  • Variety of filters and presets
  • Support for RAW image files
  • Ability to organize and manage photos

Cons

  • Slightly expensive
  • The learning curve is high

Pricing: Free to download (Solo Legacy filters start at $3.99)

Summing up…

Explore these excellent photo editing apps on your iPhone and iPad to expand your creative horizons. Let your imagination run wild and produce extraordinary works of art that will astound everyone.

Please share your most prized works in the comments section below as we eagerly await to see your amazing creations. Your original artistic vision is waiting for its chance to shine!

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Introducing Bhaskar, your tech-savvy neighbor turned wordsmith extraordinaire. Over the past few years, Bhaskar has become the trusted authority for unraveling the mysteries of iOS, Android, macOS, and Windows. Armed with a B.Tech degree, he has dedicated himself to making technology easy to understand for everyone. His expertise shines through his contributions to well-known publications like Guiding Tech, iGeeksBlog, GeekFrost, and MakeUseOf (MUO). Bhaskar excels in creating straightforward how-to guides and comprehensive articles that make the complex tech landscape accessible to all. When he's not diving into the tech world, you'll find him enjoying music or indulging in sports.

Introducing Bhaskar, your tech-savvy neighbor turned wordsmith extraordinaire. Over the past few years, Bhaskar has become the trusted authority for unraveling the mysteries of iOS, Android, macOS, and Windows. Armed with a B.Tech degree, he has dedicated himself to making technology easy to understand for everyone. His expertise shines through his contributions to well-known publications like Guiding Tech, iGeeksBlog, GeekFrost, and MakeUseOf (MUO). Bhaskar excels in creating straightforward how-to guides and comprehensive articles that make the complex tech landscape accessible to all. When he's not diving into the tech world, you'll find him enjoying music or indulging in sports.

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This Post Has 2 Comments

  1. Hello, Bhaskar I appreciate your assistance with these apps. With so many apps available on the internet today, I think it will be simple to choose the best ones. Please share a blog that is also available for Android devices.

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