Aside from the practical side – that unlike digital camera, most people always have their phone at hand – camera phones also have other advantages over traditional digital camera: the availability of apps to tinker with the pictures. If you are an iPhone users, here are two must-have free apps that will help you in your images adventure.
1. Diptic
The common way to share pictures is by treating each item as a standalone entity. But that is not the only way. You can also merge several images into one and create new and unique combinations. The reason why most common people did not take this path is because they think the process is too much of a hassle to go through just to share pictures. But Diptic is about to change that. The app makes combining few photos into one as easy as drag and drop. I personally feel that this app is similar to Pages or iWeb in the terms that they all use pre-made template to complete a project. The first step in using the app is choosing what frame template that you want to use from many of the available choices. Then you can continue with choosing the photos.
Tap one pane of the frame and fill it with a photo. You can take a brand new photo by using iPhone camera or use images from your photo album. Being a traditional amateur photographer that I am, I personally prefer not to use newly made photos for the project as I’d like to keep unedited photos that I take. You can resize the photo inside the pane and move it around to focus on o specific part of it. And after you finish with one frame, move on to the next until you fill in all the blank pane(s).
Each photo is also editable. Tap the “Effect” menu to access basic photo editing tools like brightness and color. You can also adjust the border by tapping the “Border” button at the top right corner of the interface.
Choose “Export” menu to finalize your creation.
2. Instagram
Most people share their images with family and friends. But why stop there? Why not share your masterpieces to the world? The second app that I think every iPhone amateur photographer should have is Instagram. This app is like the social side of photo sharing. Even if the world is not your goal, this app will make sharing photos to your loved ones a lot easier. Start by registering for an Instagram account. This account is the anchor that will connect your other social network account.
Then continue by building your network of friends that you want to share your pictures to. But instead of building one from a scratch, why not using the ones that you’ve already had? Instagram makes it easy to connect your account to your Facebook and Twitter accounts.
The pictures that you want to share can come from your photo library or from the ones that you take directly from within Instagram. If you allow it, Instagram can send you push notifications of the things that happens in your network in the form of alerts, sound and icon badges. You can also browse interesting pictures from other users, or read news about your circle of friends.
These two are my personal favorite. If you have your own nominees, you can share the list using the comment below.
