Photoshop Express

Photoshop Express is a very simple photo editing application for the iPhone. The best thing about this application is that it is free, unlike many of the other photo applications we tested.

There are five buttons along the button of the application: Adobe, Edit, Online, Upload and Settings. Adobe is simply sample photos and links to more effects, tips, etc... The edit tab is what you will probably use most. On the edit tab (see photo right), you can crop, adjust the exposure, saturation, tint, contrast or make the photo black & white. The next button over is used to give the photo effects such as sketch, soft focus or sharpen. The final button on the top row (the stars) allows you to add more effects, such as vibrant, pop, vignette blur, etc... and borders.

Those are your only options, but that should be enough for journalistic uses. The bottom buttons let you cancel, redo/undo and save. Under the save menu, as you can see in the image, you can save and exit, upload (Photoshop.com), post to Facebook or TwitPic.

This application is geared for quick edits to photos. To edit a photo, click a type of edit that you want to make, such as Saturation. It will give you a tip (unless you turn them off) on how to best use this edit. For instance, the tip on how to change the saturation says "slowly slide your finger left/right over the image to adjust the saturation level." All you have to do is pinch or push like you would to zoom in/out and the levels will change.

I would definitely recommend this application. It is easy, powerful and free.

Photogene

Photogene is easily my favorite photo editing application on the iPhone. It is very simple, yet effective. It does everything that you would want to do to edit your photos in a journalistic function and then some.

The buttons on the side are fairly self-explanatory, but I will briefly go over them. The scissors button is for cropping - simply drag the size of the box you would like and hit crop. The two arrows in the form of a box is for rotating the image. The filter button is the one that looks like an oil filter. This is for more drastic effects such as sharpen, pencil, blur, black & white, posterize, sepia, nightvision and heatmap. You can adjust the strength of each of these filters or reset to the original photo. The color wheel button allows you a great deal of control when it comes to color adjusting. You can change the levels (auto levels works wonderfully), the exposure, the colors and the red-green-blue balance of the photo.

The next two buttons are something that you will most likely not use for journalistic function - the star button allows you to add shapes such as a speech bubble and the square allows you to add a border or frame.

If you make a mistake, click on the back or redo arrows, which are the next buttons down. The final button is used to save your edits. You can change the resolution of the photo (200, 320, 640, 800, 1024, 1600, 2048 and 2592 for high resolution images). You can also preserve geotags, and share your image in a variety of ways such as email, FTP, flickr and Facebook.

Photogene is only $1.99 and I would highly recommend it!

If you don't take my word, take the word of Glyn Evans, the founder of iPhonegraphy. His website, http://www.iphoneography.com/ features all photos shot on mobile devices. This is his opinion of Photogene:

Photogene is like having a desktop photo editor in your pocket, giving you the ability to truly edit your photos on the go, letting you crop, sharpen, straighten, rotate and add frames to your photos, as well as manually or automatically adjust histogram levels, gamma correction, RGB balance, the colour temperature and saturation.

Camera Bag

CameraBag is an extremely easy to use photo application for the iPhone. It uses the built-in camera on the phone to take pictures, so you don’t need any extra equipment (although lenses and flashes wouldn’t hurt), and it’s pretty cheap to buy.

The specialty of this application is to put filters on the pictures you take. There are several different ones, although some, like color cross, I can’t see anybody using for professional reasons, and others look very much the same. But there are enough different, useful filters that this application deserves a download and a look.

CameraBag doesn’t require that you use the application to take the pictures, and in fact the application works better if you just take the pictures and put them on your camera roll. If you have it open when you’re shooting, each picture will open on the camera, and before you take another, you will have to click on the phone to open our camera back up. Instead, you can go out and take your pictures, then upload them to CameraBag.

Either way, once you have your picture, it’s a simple process of flicking the screen from side to side to see which filter works best for what you’re using. Helga has ended up being my favorite, but really the story would warrant the filter, if you use one at all. Once you’ve chosen, you just have to tap the save button and your picture will be saved to your camera roll, so that you can text, email or upload it like any other picture you take.

In all, the application is a pretty neat little deal. It’s certainly something you wouldn’t use every time you go into the field, but if you were working on a story that was a bit more featurey than normal, I could certainly see it coming in handy. If you do use it, it’s simple and quick, and getting the pictures off your phone is virtually effortless.