Top Five Photo Apps – Photo App Lounge – By Em Kachouro
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 recently published the Top Five Photo Apps as recommended by Yannick Brice , Cedric Blanchon, Irene Sneddon, our Columnist and Award Winning Mobile Artist Sarah Jarrett as well as Louise Fryer, Lisa Waddell, Davide Capponi, Ali Jardine, Clint Cline, Elaina Wilcox, France Freeman, Tess Gomm, Lola Mitchell and Vivi’s Top Five Photo Apps including accompanying images demonstrating these selections, if you missed those, please go here.
Today, we are featuring Em Kachouro, we have Kachouro in many of our Flickr Group showcases and we’re delighted today to publish this wonderful article today.
Number One— Procreate
©Em Kachouro – Snapseed, Procreate
My first app that I ever bought for my iPad was Procreate — and it’s still my favourite one. It’s not an app for editing photos like e.g. Snapseed, my Number Two app. Procreate is an app made for sketching, painting, creating . But, of course, you can import a photo and modify it via those sketch and paint tools. But Procreate offers a lot of more: You can work with layers and merge them in a variety of ways (e.g. multiply, linear burn, color dodge). As I come from Photoshop world, I felt very familiar with those possibilities – but Procreate is a lot easier to learn and use.
When I like to quickly merge to pictures, I use Image Blender. But when I like to apply some paint and sketch effects between layers, I prefer Procreate.
The above picture is my first one I ever made with Procreate. It took me 20 minutes; the source is a photo I took with my iPad in Ada/Tuscany (Italy).
You can use Procreate even without importing photos. The following picture was painted completely on Procreate and was processed afterwards with some photo apps as it were a photo.
Number Two – Snapseed
©Em Kachouro – Source photo
Snapseed is my basic tool I use for nearly every photo before processing it with other apps. I tried out a variety of apps for tuning and adjusting, but I always come back to Snapseed. Just for grunge effects I prefer other apps. Snapseed offers some random buttons for specific tools.
Sometimes I’d like to have some random proposals for a whole set of effects to get some unexpected results you can work with– and in this case I first use Snapseed and then e.g. Phototoaster.
I processed the photo of the little model car in the first steps with Snapseed before it went into further processing steps with other apps (Image Blender, Color Lake).
©Em Kachouro – Snapseed, Image Blender, Color Lake, Repix
Number Three – ToonCamera
©Em Kachouro – ToonCamera, Procreate, Snapseed
For converting photos into cartoons and pencil art, I can recommend ToonCamera. It doesn’t work for all subjects and often the effect is too exaggerated. You have to find out, play around, experiment. In the following photo of a hairdressing salon it worked fine. The picture was first processed with ToonCamera. Then I wrote the text in Procreate and mirrored it – and finally the picture got its specific atmosphere via Snapseed.
Number Four — Vintage Scene HD
©Em Kachouro – Snapseed, Vintage Scene HD, Image Blender
My favorite vintage app is currently Vintage Scene HD. It offers you a lot of presets and also a random button. Some effects remind me on really old newspaper pictures. The following pictures show this vintage newspaper style.
Number Five – Color Lake
©Em Kachouro – Snapseed, Vintage Scene HD, Alien Sky
I also like to mention in this list an app with one special feature: With Color Lake you can add and modify water reflections to your picture. I also used it in my picture with the little black model car you can see above. I always use Color Lake as one of a multitude of tools – but for water reflections it’s perfect and easy to use.
Links To All Apps Mentioned
Procreate
Snapseed
Image Blender
Color Lake
Repix
ToonCamera
Vintage Scene HD
PhotoToaster
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Joanne Carter
Joanne Carter is a British photographer, photography journalist, editor and curator and the founder and editorial director of TheAppWhisperer.com, an independent international photography publication established in 2009.Her journalism, criticism and commentary have appeared in The Times, The Sunday Times, The Guardian, Financial Times, BBC, Vogue Italia, LensCulture, Popular Photography, Android Magazine, NikonPro, DPReview, Which Digital Camera and Which Camera. She has lectured internationally on photography and mobile art, served as a juror for international photography awards, and exhibited her own photographic work across the UK, Europe, South Korea and the United States.Alongside her editorial work, Joanne's photographic and postgraduate research explores death, grief, memory, representation and social inequality through contemporary photography, participatory practice and visual research methods, with the longer-term aim of developing this work through doctoral research.Through TheAppWhisperer, she continues to publish independent photography journalism spanning contemporary photographic practice, mobile imaging, photographic apps, computational photography and emerging imaging technologies.Joanne is available for editorial commissions, photography projects, judging, curatorial work, speaking engagements, consultancy and selected collaborations.
