My Top-five photo-editing apps for smartphones

These apps put a picture-editor in your pocket

They bring sophisticated photo-editing and darkroom effects within the range of the complete novice.

I’ve been playing around with a range of photo-editing apps recently, and I’m impressed with what you can do in terms of creating photo panoramas, adding effects, frames and combining individual photos in a clean and elegant picture layout or grid.

It means you can create some very professional effects without any photographic knowledge at all – apart from having an eye for a good shot. After that the apps take over, turning your snap into something that wouldn’t embarrass the pages of a glossy mag, let alone a web page
Not all the apps do all of these things, most go for one aspect of picture editing and publishing, so you can use them best in combination, as I'll demonstrate below.
Because I use an iPhone, and believe it’s the best phone for journalism, my list is slanted towards that phone, but some of the apps are available for Android as well, and if they aren’t I’ve tried to identify a reasonable alternative.

1 Autostitch

Autostitch automatically recognises matching images – that is, images where some of the same information is contained in them. So if you take a series of pictures that overlap by about a third, Autostitch turns them into a complete panorama, which it builds with no input from you.
Perfect when you’ve got a line up of people to shoot, or a panoramic landscape, or if you simply want to take several shots of part of the scene you wish to capture and have the app knit those elements together.
So you can use it simply to make up for the narrow lens angle achievable on the smartphone own lens
Here’s a simple panorama:

 Here'a scene that wouldn’t fit in one frame

I've left the borders as they are, but Autostich has a cropping tool so you can tidy the image up if you like.
You can also get creative with Autostitch. You can trick it, by loading pictures that while covering the same scene, don’t all overlap and have key elements of the scene in different places:
For instance, there is only one stone pillar in the middle of this labyrinth, but because I shot about 15 pictures, not all of which overlap, several viewpoints combine and it looks like

there are several ghostly pillars
Likewise, there is only one statue of Elgar, and one rock obelisk, in this park in Malvern. But notice how the shops in the background ahve bene stitched perfectly, because this element of my photos had enough common data for Autostitch to do its job:

 Likewise, there's only one cat, and he wasn't moving fast at all:

 You'll find a demonstration of my other four top photo-editing apps at the MMJ website: http://www.multimedia-journalism.co.uk/node/1558

This is sneak preview of Masterclass 16 on MMJ, which is the first in a series of loosely linked sessions about publishing platforms that will go live over the coming weeks. It'll be going live on Saturday November 13 here www.multimedia-journalism.co.uk/masterclasses

This one is about creating smart phone apps without having any knowledge of coding, and in future masterclases we’ll also cover website building for non-coders, platforms for hyperlocal projects, data-driven journalism, and look at what html and other coding you should learn, if you’d like to progress as a creator of mobile and static platforms for your journalism.

I’ve chosen the subjects partly because they are a logical progression from what we’ve covered so far in the book version of MMJ, and its supporting website, and also to build on what we’ve done in some previous masterclasses – particularly MC 11 on going mobile.

I’ve also chosen them because the MMJ community has been asking for more on these topics, and on such related things as creating RSS feeds and the use of Yahoo Pipes as a data-combining device.

RSS feed creation is something we dealt with briefly in MC 11 but we look at it in a lot more depth here. Because, with the use of Yahoo Pipes you can create tightly defined information streams, built from numerous sources, and use them to populate your mobile or static site.

It’s getting easier all the time for non-coders to create smartphone apps. While developers are charging anything from $2-3 thousand dollars up to $10 or even $15 thousand, it is now possible for you to create a professional looking app, which aggregates content either from your static site or from a range of sources chosen by you, and which includes text, stills audio and video, and which is listed in the Apple iTunes and Android market stores.

You can bring all your social presences together: your news feed if you have one, your blog, you Youtube channel, Twitter feed, Audioboo and the rest

I’ve chosen one from a handful of software companies that I think get us as close as we currently can to creating a truly professional multimedia smartphone app on our own.

It’s called iSites, and while it’s not yet perfect, and it will cost you from $9.99 a month  to publish with it, it seems to me to show the way forward.

I’ve had some glitches with it, but I’ve been impressed at how the guys there respond to problems raised and work to iron out bugs.

It means it’s perfectly possible for you as an individual, or for a team on a journalism course or who are creating a hyperlocal or other project, to amalgamate their multimedia content in one professional app.

You’ll also find information here on a number of other outfits that let you build your own app.

So, I hope you find this masterclass helpful. If there are questions it doesn’t answer, please get in touch. You can use any of the comment buttons on the MMJ site, or go on Twitter, Facebook, the blog or any of the other platforms you’ll find lined to on the site.

This is Masterclass 16 on MMJ and it’s the first in a series of loosely linked sessions about publishing platforms that will go live over the coming weeks.

This one is about creating smart phone apps without having any knowledge of coding, and in future masterclases we’ll also cover website building for non-coders, platforms for hyperlocal projects, data-driven journalism and look at what html and other coding you should learn, if you’d like to progress as a creator of mobile and static platforms for your journalism.

I’ve chosen the subjects partly because they are a logical progression of what we’ve covered so far in the book version of MMJ, and its supporting website, and also to build on what we’ve done in some previous masterclasses – particularly MC 11 on going mobile.

I’ve also chosen them because the MMJ community has been asking for more on these topics, and on such related things as creating RSS feeds and the use of Yahoo Pipes as a data-combinig device.

RSS feed creation is something we dealt with briefly in MC 11 but we look at it in a lot more depth here. Because, with the use of Yahoo Pipes you can create tightly defined information streams, built from numerous sources and use them to populate your mobile or static site.

It’s getting easier all the time for non-coders to create smartphone apps. While developers are charging anything from $2-3thousand dollars up to $10 or even $15 thousand, it is now possible for you to create a professional looking app, which aggregates content either from your static site or from a range of sources chosen by you, and which includes text, stills audio and video, and which is listed in the Apple iTunes and Android market stores.

You can bring all your social presences together: your news feed if you have one, your blog, you Youtube channel, Twitter feed, Audioboo and the rest

I’ve chosen one from a handful of software companies that I think get us as close as we currently can to creating a truly professional multimedia smartphone app on our own.

It’s called iSites, and while it’s not yet perfect, and it will cost you $9 a month minimum to publish with it, it seems to me to show the way forward.

I’ve had some glitches with it, but I’ve been impressed at how the guys there respond to problems raised and work to iron out bugs.

It means it’s perfectly possible for you as an individual, or for a team on a journalism course or who are creating a hyperlocal or other project, to amalgamate their multimedia content in one professional app.

You’ll also find information here on a number of other outfits that let you build your own app.

So, I hope you find this masterclass helpful. If there are questions it doesn’t answer, please get in touch. You can use any of the comment buttons on the MMJ site, or go on Twitter, Facebook, the blog or any of the other platforms you’ll find lined to on the site.

Music on the video from http://www.peaceloveproductions.com/freemusic.html