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Top Five Photo Apps – Photo App Lounge by Vanessa Vox

Welcome to our Top Five Photo Apps – Photo App Lounge section of theappwhisperer.com. This is an area on our site where we ask highly accomplished mobile photographers what their top five photo apps are and why.

We previously published the Top Five Photo Apps as recommended by Yannick Brice , Cedric Blanchon, Irene Sneddon, Sarah Jarrett, Louise Fryer, Lisa Waddell, Davide Capponi, Ali Jardine, Clint Cline, Elaina Wilcox, France Freeman, Tess Gomm, Lola Mitchell, Vivi, Em Kachouro, Laetitia Harnie-Coussau, MaryJane Sarvis, AlyZen Moonshadow, Ginaluca Ricoveri, Jennifer Sharpe, Natali Prosvetova and David Hayes’ Top Five Photo Apps including accompanying images demonstrating these selections, if you missed those, please go here.

This time Vanessa Vox talks us through her Top Five Mobile photography apps with wonderful imagery and explanations. Don’t miss this, over to you Vanessa (foreword by Joanne Carter).

 

“For this article I counted my favorite apps and found more than twenty-five! So I asked myself: How can I reduce my selection to five? And how can I illustrate them most well? – And then came the idea: I’ll take only one shot and let my fingers find the five apps intuitively during the editing process.

These are the Top Five Photo Apps (with links) that inspired me to this photo collage called “FEELING ONE“

Beauty Booth
• Classic Vintage
Photo Editor
Vintage Scene
Superimpose

 

1st Step: Beauty Booth Pro (by JellyBus) : Emphasizing the facial expression

photo

©Vanessa Vox

This app detects faces, smooths and tones the skin. First of all you have to choose one of two suggestions. Afterwards the magic wand offers more presets which you can fine-tune with three sliders: Brightness/Smoothing/Filter opacity. Of course there are more functions in Beauty Booth but I never use them. (A hint: Never forget to push the eye’s glances to the right place or set it to 0 percent, this, I always do.)

I am always searching for something like an icon or archetype when I work on my self-portraits. That’s why I softened and reduced the detail information of the original pic. Especially the eye and the ear were important to me.

Now I’ve got an excellent foundation for the next step using different papers and vintage effects.

2nd Step: Classic Vintage (by AiNeuron): Transcending the picture

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©Vanessa Vox

This app is one of my recent discoveries. I am actually fascinated by Classic Vintage with the beautiful old painting design when you open it. I enjoy the different papers, crackles, borders, and also the sepia tone.

The results are most of the time a little bit excessive but I am surprised how often I use them. But anyway you can always reduce the opacity with predetermined percents for a more delicate or poetic outcome.

I’ve chosen a textured paper and a crackle from the Nevada set, a sepia tone and 0 percent frames. The crackles give a fragile feeling. They break the surface. A symbol of transience and impending loss.

Classic Vintage has a comfortable preview function. You can continue to work or trying out other opacity percents without waiting for the rendering process. (You will see that a fine frame is walking through the picture which means that these parts were rendered in the background).

By the way: I once needed the customer mail service. And it is really fast, competent and friendly.

3rd Step: PhotoWizard (by Pankaj Goswami) : My classic editing tool

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©Vanessa Vox

I have many favorite editing tools: Photo Toaster, Snapseed, Laminar Pro... But I really don’t know why: PhotoWizard is mostly my day to day app with all the standard tools in the classic form (curves, histogram, sharpness, shadows/highlights…). The effects section is also interesting: In this case I used the light leak option with reduced opacity in my self-portrait. And afterwards the sharpness option. Although this app is not supposed to give a painterly effect it did the job for me. Photo Wizard is really easy to use, fast and absolutely great. It has a full undo and redo function. Honestly I would not want to miss PhotoWizard.

4th Step: Vintage Scene (by JixiPix): Getting a gorgeous vintage look

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©Vanessa Vox

I really love all the JixiPix apps! The processing is not the fastest, but I appreciate the possibility to fine-tune the chosen preset and to save the settings as my own preset. It speeds up my workflow next time! There are many fantastic styles in three groups (Vintage style/Antique Photo/Faded Time) and a lot of adjustment possibilities, including the choice of a new papers or frames. You will discover beautiful textures there and many inspiring combinations!

In this case the effect is not so obvious because I used it cautiously.

5th Step: Superimpose (by Pankaj Goswami): Great photo compositing app

For fast blendings Image Blender is easy to use. But for complex compositings I prefer Superimpose. It is great for layering, adjusting, moving, masking etc. But only when you know how! Some of the functions are not very easy to find. So you have to get used to it.

I appreciate the magic wand as an alternative tool to the brush for the mask. A big advantage of this app is that you can save your mask in png.

Very welcome when you want to continue or rebuild your work another day. So your precisely and hard elaborated mask is not lost! I extracted my blackbird and the rose from their original backgrounds, moved them into my pic and chose a blending mode.

This is the end result through my Top Five Apps:

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‘FEELING ONE’ – ©Vanessa Vox

A symbiotic feeling with nature. A close encounter of three creatures: Blackbird, rose and human being. A reminder to take care of our beautiful world. A witness of an ancient wisdom. We all belong together. We are all ONE which is symbolized by the pair of eyes.

 

Thanks to Joanne Carter and theappwhisperer.com for promoting all about iphoneography. Its a fascinating new experience.

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Joanne Carter, creator of the world’s most popular mobile photography and art website— TheAppWhisperer.com— TheAppWhisperer platform has been a pivotal cyberspace for mobile artists of all abilities to learn about, to explore, to celebrate and to share mobile artworks. Joanne’s compassion, inclusivity, and humility are hallmarks in all that she does, and is particularly evident in the platform she has built. In her words, “We all have the potential to remove ourselves from the centre of any circle and to expand a sphere of compassion outward; to include everyone interested in mobile art, ensuring every artist is within reach”, she has said. Promotion of mobile artists and the art form as a primary medium in today’s art world, has become her life’s focus. She has presented lectures bolstering mobile artists and their art from as far away as the Museum of Art in Seoul, South Korea to closer to her home in the UK at Focus on Imaging. Her experience as a jurist for mobile art competitions includes: Portugal, Canada, US, S Korea, UK and Italy. And her travels pioneering the breadth of mobile art includes key events in: Frankfurt, Naples, Amalfi Coast, Paris, Brazil, London. Pioneering the world’s first mobile art online gallery - TheAppWhispererPrintSales.com has extended her reach even further, shipping from London, UK to clients in the US, Europe and The Far East to a global group of collectors looking for exclusive art to hang in their homes and offices. The online gallery specialises in prints for discerning collectors of unique, previously unseen signed limited edition art. Her journey towards becoming The App Whisperer, includes (but is not limited to) working for a paparazzi photo agency for several years and as a deputy editor for a photo print magazine. Her own freelance photographic journalistic work is also widely acclaimed. She has been published extensively both within the UK and the US in national and international titles. These include The Times, The Sunday Times, The Guardian, Popular Photography & Imaging, dpreview, NikonPro, Which? and more recently with the BBC as a Contributor, Columnist at Vogue Italia and Contributing Editor at LensCulture. Her professional photography has also been widely exhibited throughout Europe, including Italy, Portugal and the UK. She is currently writing several books, all related to mobile art and is always open to requests for new commissions for either writing or photography projects or a combination of both. Please contact her at: joanne@theappwhisperer.com

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