Top 15 Must Have Free iPhone Apps For Designers and Creative Souls

Currently, there are a lot of great iPhone apps for photos, both for taking photos in-app as well as post editing.

Some iPhone photo apps allow you to apply filters and affects, allowing you to create a vintage look, add vignette shadows, create a sepia toned or black and white photo, etc. Others allow you to fix problems like red-eye, overexposure or underexposure. Others still let you add silly clip art like mustaches, santa hats and bunny ears.

Given the popularity of photo apps, I've listed several of the best free camera apps for iPhone below. These are iPhone apps for photos that I've found to be the best, based on how many quality features they offer, whether or not the free version lets you edit existing photo's and the quality of the results.

1. Instagram
Instagram gets my top vote and is currently my favorite iPhone photo editing app. Instagram offers a wide variety of filters you can apply to your photo's. This completely free (like all I mention here) iPhone photo edit app lets you edit and apply effects to photo's from your phone photo album or take pictures from within the app. It allows you to quickly scroll through and apply different filters and see what the photo looks like in real-time without the longer lag that other photo edit apps sometimes take to apply an effect. It's easy to share directly to Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, Tumblr, Foursquare and Posterous with the in-app sharing features.

But what really makes Instagram a top-notch free app is the excellent quality of the filters and the platform's own social network.

The filters, in addition the the app itself, are well-designed to transform even the most boring of snapshots into gorgeous photos.

Instagram app also offers it's own integrated photo-sharing social network where you can share your photos, comment, follow others and others can follow you, similar to Twitter. Because of this unique model, Instagram has soared in popularity and was recently named Top App of the Year by Apple.

Below are some examples of photos I edited in Instagram:

Before and After


Before and After


I used a filter effect plus the radial Tilt-Shift blur effect on this photo to create the "miniature" look!


2. Retro Camera
Retro Camera is similar in that it applies an overall effect to your pictures. However Retro Camera's interface is slightly different. To choose the effect you would like for your picture, you first select from one of six available cameras, (Barbl, Little Orange Box, Xolaroid 2000, Pinhole Camera, Fudge Can and Hipsteroku), and then take the picture.

The camera options each offer their own effect based on the effects that the actual camera they are named after were known for. For example, the Holga camera, one of the Retro Camera app's options, applies an effect to pictures reminiscent of an actual Holga camera.

(In case your not familiar with the Holga camera, it was created in the early 1980's in China as a cheap, inexpensive camera option. It quickly became popular in the U.S. because of the surrealistic quality of it's photo's, due to the light leaks and vignette effects created from the inexpensive meniscus lens).

The Retro Camera app for iPhone also offers an endearing way of displaying the photographs you've taken within the app, by showing them as actual "photographs" clipped to a wire, dark-room style.

Photo edited in Retro Camera app


3. CamWow
CamWow - what can I say, this free iPhone camera app is pure fun! While it may not produce the same "upscale" effects that apps like Instagram creates, it does offer a wide variety of effects, including more surreal and trippy filters and effects like night vision, thermal, pop art and x-ray in addition to distortion effects like mirror, bulge, stretch and squeeze. And you can apply the filters real-time.

I'm ashamed to admit how many pictures I took of myself when I first downloaded this app. Alone and sitting on the couch, using the distortion filters and forward facing camera, I created a slew of ridiculous photos of myself, just for laughs. I'd be mortified if anyone ever found my phone and quickly realized I was some poor lonely soul taking silly pictures of herself. Thankfully, there's lots of similar pictures of my kids, our dog and random household items that my kids have photographed. So, of course I'd just blame them.

The CamWow app will keep kids (or easily amused adults like myself) entertained for HOURS. But you might consider figuring out how to disable the "Share to Facebook" feature, should your kids decide to upload a "fat head" photo of you to your Facebook profile.

4. Postagram
Postagram is a wonderfully simple, yet ingenious concept - take one of your gorgeous (or silly) photo's, created from one of the above free iPhone apps (or any photo for that matter), and create a real, honest-to-goodness postcard and have it snail-mailed to the lucky recipient of your choice for just 99 cents! You can select someone right from your phone's contact list and even send a single postcard to more than one person.

What a great way to say hello to an old friend or share a great iPhone photo with an off-the-grid Grandma! I mean, really, who even gets real snail-mail these days!

The Postagram postcard photo's are high quality 300 dpi photo's printed on a simple, classy, sharp-looking black postcard layout, and best of all, the postcards are designed so that the photo image easily pops out, ready for a fridge or frame.

(Postagram, like Instagram, can also serve as a unique and effective tool to market your business. If you're interested in finding out how you can use Postagram to market your business - click here to read my blog post "How To Use Postagram to Market Your Business")

5. Adobe Photoshop Express
Adobe Photoshop Express is in most ways, another photo editing app. However, it's editing features are a bit more broken down into simple edit steps, like crop, rotate or adjust color, which differs from apps like Instagram and Retro Camera, which apply pre-designed filter for an overall effect.

The Adobe Photoshop Express can thus be handy if you're looking to make a specific adjustment to your photo, like add a vignette shadow or turn your photo into a sketch.

More importantly, if you use a Photoshop.com account to share online photo's, then this is meant to be it's companion app, giving you access to your Photoshop.com collection on the go.

6. Photobucket
Photobucket for iPhone lets you peruse other people's recently uploaded public Photobucket photo's and upload, download, share move or copy your own photos to your Photobucket account.

In addition this app provides easy access to your photo's url's in case you want to link to them online, such as in a Squidoo lens, like I've done on this lens! An easy-to-use interface, easy album management and an option to select and upload multiple photos at once qualifies the Photobucket as one of the must have free iPhone apps.

7. Flickr
Flickr I personally have found Flickr and Photobucket each offer their own unique features.

Flickr has an extensive user community of photographers, artists and creatives making it an invaluable resource for inspiration and trend following. In addition, the Flickr Creative Commons is a great resource for bloggers and others who write online, (including us Squidoo-ers!), looking for great photos we can use with our articles. Flickr also seems to be more popular among my friends and family, so I've chosen Flickr to store my personal photo's of friends and family, in addition to my photography, because it makes it easier to share them.

I've found Photobucket to be more conducive to hosting photo's online that I will need to link to, whether as part of a blog post or Squidoo article, Facebook comment, etc. Photobucket makes it very easy for me to grab various types of link code to any of my photo's for use online. In addition they make it easy to resize and edit my photo's.

The Photobucket app, for example, was very useful in this article. I wanted to add some before and after sample photo's for the Photo editing apps. The Photobucket app allowed me to upload the photo's from my iPhone. And although Photobucket makes it easy to grab code snippet of your photo's from within the app, I will admit I did some tinkering from my Macbook before posting them here - because I found the original size to be too big and I wanted to minimize my Squidoo lens loading time, I edited each photo (via Photobucket website) to a smaller, preset size, saved it as a copy, then grabbed the html link. All of which was very quick and easy thanks to Photobucket's interface.

It's possible to also do this from within the app, however I happened to also be on my Macbook and found it easier to do it there. But thanks to my Photobucket app, the moment I uploaded my photo's via the app they were available also in my online Photobucket account!

8. Stop Motion Shop
If you've ever seen a stop motion film and been inspired at the idea of making one, now's your chance! Stop Motion Shop is the best free iPhone app I've found for making stop motion videos.

It's free and very easy to use. My daughter and I just used this app recently to make a stop motion film of a sock sneaking around the sock drawer. It only took about 10 minutes of setup and filming and the stop motion film turned out great.

However, this free app does not allow you to upload it to Youtube or elsewhere nor can you save the video to your phone. It's saved and accessible only through the app, which means it's extremely difficult if not impossible to share it with others online.

You might consider paying the 99 cents or more for a paid Stop Motion app, such as Stop Motion Recorder. If you end up creating a stop motion masterpiece, you'll want to share it with others!

Stop Motion Recorder offers additional features like filters, allowing you to apply filters to your video to give it a lomo or other vintage look, as well as the ability to share it on multiple social media channels/sites.

9. Animation Creator Lite
Animation Creator Lite is another creative app that is a lot of fun to play with! Create your own animations, by drawing a series of pictures on your iPhone and then animating them. It provides a layering feature to help you line up your new drawing with the previous drawings. Within five minutes of downloading it I managed to create a fun little animation of a root growing into a big beautiful tree!

However, as with many free iPhone apps, the free version of this app does not allow you to share your animation creation. To do so you have to upgrade to the paid version. The app does allow you to export the file, and I tried to then use an online converter to convert the .prj format file to a Youtube compatible file, but because the app creates files with an .acprj file extension, the online converter was unable to convert that type of file. I might be able to rename the file with just a .prj extension, but I gave up. I would probably just pay the 99 cents and upgrade if I really wanted to share it!

10. CliqCliq Colors
CliqCliq Colors is a free iPhone color palette app allows you to create color apps from photos and then convert them into different scales and formats for web & graphic design use. The app is fun, but does have some limitations. One problem I noted was that the app automatically pulls colors from your photos...but it doesn't always pull the exact colors you want, nor does it provide you with the ability to use your finger to select the exact color you want.

There's a similar color palette app called Color Expert, that seems to offer all that Cliq Cliq does not, including the ability to handpick a color from a photo, no limitations on how many color palettes you can create, and a full range of various color palettes including Pantone color palettes. However, Color Expert is $9.99 - but while not free, I felt it was worth noting here as a paid app option.

11. WhatTheFont
WhatTheFont is a fun and useful app that lets the user take pictures of images that feature great typography or fonts and the app identifies them! Imagine you're browsing through a magazine and run across an ad featuring a cool font - simply snap a photo and the app will identify which font was used!

Another fun typography app, although not free, but worth mentioning is TypeDrawing.

For $1.99, this app allows you to sketch unique images using your own words as the brush strokes! You can use photo's as a backdrop and then draw over them and use them as a guide, for example, for a self portrait. Simply change the background to a solid color when you've finished.

There's a TypeDrawing Flickr group dedicated to sharing images created from the TypeDrawing app and several Youtube tutorials and demonstrations as well.

12. Evernote
Evernote app for iPhone claims to turn your iPhone "into an extension of your brain, helping you remember anything and everything that happens in your life. From notes to ideas to snapshots to recordings, put it all into Evernote and watch as it instantly synchronizes from your iPhone to your Mac or Windows desktop." Evernote gets high-marks and great reviews around the web. It works best when you're also using the Evernote app on your pc or laptop, since the key feature is that it can take all of the information you've saved to it in either and make it accessible from either. So you can access things you saved on your iPhone from your laptop and vice versa.

13. SpringPad
SpringPad is similar to Evernote in that it lets you capture all sorts of information and access it from anywhere. However, Evernote sets a cap on how much new data you can add per month, offering a premium paid monthly service if you wish to add more than the cap set on free storage. SpringPad currently has no limits and does not offer a premium service. There are also differences in the interfaces and use of tags, etc. I would suggest doing a bit of research if you think you'll be using either service quite a bit.

14. Paypal
Paypal
app for iPhone offers all the conveniences of Paypal when you're on the go. In addition, it offers some useful additional features like being able to take a picture of a check to add money to your Paypal account with no fee and the bump feature to exchange contact information and send money to each other via Paypal. As a freelance designer I've found this app to be useful and my husband plans to use it on his next charity bike trip to keep track of his fundraising via Paypal.

15. Dexigner
Dexigner is an app that keeps designers up to date on the latest graphic design news and events and provides access to a huge international design database. If you're a serious designer, it's important to stay up-to-date on news and trends related to your field and this app is a perfect solution.

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