«The best camera is the one you have with you» is an old adage in photography, and there’s a lot of truth to it. Even as someone who has at least five cameras at home, I capture more photos with my smartphone than I do anything else. And smartphone cameras are so good now that it doesn’t even feel like a tradeoff.

But capturing photos is just the first half of creating a good image. To really make great photos, you also need to edit them. Thankfully, over the last few years, software has developed so that the best photo editing device is often the one you have with you. There are a number of excellent photo editing apps for iPhone and Android that are as powerful and effective as any desktop or web app.

I’ve been shooting photos clickbet88 bola for almost half my life and writing about (and teaching) photography for more than a decade. And even as someone who loves the slow, deliberate work of taking a film photo or hiking somewhere to capture a landscape at sunrise, most of the time, I use my phone. For this article, I tested more than 30 of the top iPhone and Android photo editors—and these are the best six.

The best photo editors for iPhone and Android

• Adobe Photoshop Lightroom for a professional mobile photo editing app
• Snapseed for a free, powerful photo editing app for iPhone and Android
• VSCO for filter-based photo editing
• Apple Photos for a free photo editing app for iPhone
• Google Photos for a free photo editing app for Android
• Lensa for the best AI-powered photo editing app

What makes the best photo editing app for iPhone or Android?

While making basic edits to a photo can have a transformative effect, it isn’t a hard or complicated problem for developers to solve. That’s why there are so many photo editing apps out there that all work relatively well. Even the scammiest, most ad-filled app can be used to make a photo look a little brighter and sharper (though the user experience will be terrible, and you’ll probably be left with a big watermark over your photo).

While the truly awful apps are easy to avoid, the bigger problem with this situation is that there are a lot of mediocre photo editing apps out there that rely more on aggressive marketing and a high monthly subscription to stay in business, rather than because they’re the best tool for the job. If you use one of these apps, you’ll almost certainly be happy with it because your photos will look better, but you’ll be overpaying for tools you can get for free from apps that are nicer to use.

The good news for me, though, is I get to set the bar really high for what apps I include on this list. To get featured, each mobile editing app had to:

• Have powerful editing features. You need to be able to adjust the exposure, contrast, color, and crop of your image at the very least, and ideally more. Most of these editing apps offer advanced tools like curves, HSL, and local adjustments, though not always as part of the free plan. While not strictly necessary for inclusion on this list, every app that doesn’t come pre-installed on your phone has them.
• Be easy to use. A good photo editing app gets out of the way and lets you work on your photo. Even the most powerful apps have to offer a nice, intuitive workflow. Yes, the more advanced apps have a bit more of a learning curve, but every app on this list is suitable for photographers of any level.
• Provide repeatable results. When you’re editing your images, you often want to be able to make similar adjustments to multiple images. There are a few ways this can happen, and I expected more from the more professional and expensive apps. The best is that you’re able to save edits as your own preset that you can apply to any image, but copying and pasting settings between images or reapplying the previous set of edits can work too. Even a set of high-quality filters and easy-to-understand tools works in a pinch.
• Be appropriately priced with no ads and minimal nagging to upgrade. You don’t need an expensive subscription to an app to make simple edits to your images, nor do you have to use a free app that’s filled with ads or constantly hassles you to upgrade. Many of the best tools are completely free, so where an app does charge a subscription, there needs to be a serious reason to use it.

For this list, I was only considering photo editors. This means design apps like Canva, any of the million collage makers available, or even image organizers weren’t included. While some of them allow you to edit images, it’s generally more awkward than using a specific photo editor and then importing your edited image into your design app of choice.

To test any of the apps that looked like they might meet the criteria, I did the obvious thing: I imported a few images and got to editing. I’ve been using apps like these since the iPhone 3GS, so in many cases, it quickly became apparent that certain apps weren’t up to snuff. If I saw one full-screen ad for SHEIN, I wasn’t tapping any further. Of the 30-something apps I considered, these six were the clear winners. If you’re at all into photography, the names probably won’t surprise you.

The best mobile photo editing apps at a glance

Best professional mobile photo editing app

Adobe Photoshop Lightroom pros:

• Shockingly great free plan
• Super powerful editing features
• All around best-in-class

Adobe Photoshop Lightroom cons:

• Kind of confusing pricing structure
• Bit of a learning curve

Adobe Photoshop Lightroom is the gold-standard photo editing app on every platform—including iOS and Android. While aimed at professional and hobbyist photographers, it’s entirely suitable for editing any kind of image you shoot on your smartphone.

Lightroom packs a lot into a surprisingly usable app. It’s one of the best photo catalog apps, so you can use it to sort and organize your images (or even back them up to Adobe’s cloud storage), but it’s the image editing features I’m here to talk about.

All the basic tools you need to edit your images are included for free, including things like curves and the ability to save your own presets. You can tweak exposure, color, contrast, crop, and everything else. The auto adjust feature is powerful and accurate—I frequently use it as a baseline when I’m editing my own images.

Lightroom Premium adds features like local adjustments and masking, a powerful healing tool, and more presets. It’s available as part of a few different Creative Cloud plans that also include Adobe Photoshop, the desktop versions of Lightroom, and various amounts of cloud storage. The cheapest option is to upgrade through your smartphone for $4.99/month: this gets you Lightroom Premium on your smartphone and 100GB of cloud storage. For $9.99, the Lightroom 1TB plan adds Lightroom on the web and desktop, as well as 1TB of cloud storage.

The biggest downside is that Lightroom assumes you have a certain familiarity with photography. If terms like «exposure» are gibberish to you, there will be a bit of a learning curve. The tutorials are solid, and the app is legitimately nice to use, but be prepared to spend a few minutes working through things.

If you go with Lightroom, you can automate your photo editing workflows using Lightroom’s Zapier integration and connect it to all the other apps you use. You can automatically apply presents or Auto Tone, convert files into different formats, or check the status of jobs. Here are a few pre-made workflows to get you started.