Finished Products…

As a proud grandmother I love showing off photos of my two, beautiful granddaughters, but in this digital age I don't carry around an album of photos. Instead I share photos on my iPhone and iPad or upload them to my photoblog. If for some reason I want to alter these photos, I can easily edit photographs taken with my DSLR on my computer, and photos taken with my iPhone can also be easily edited directly on either the iPhone or the iPad. 

Enter the world of photo editing apps. Both iPhone and Andriod smartphones have  built-in photo album apps that allow users to adjust exposure and crop images. For a wider range of editing tools, there are numerous third-party apps from basic (exposure adjustments and cropping) to advanced (cloning, removing backgrounds, creating layers) techniques. There are probably thousands of such app for both iOS (Apple) and Android devices, and among the most popular are iPhoto (Apple only), Photoshop Express, Filterstorm, and Snapseed. 

In addition to cropping and adjusting exposure, most of the apps include features such as color correction, black and white conversion, sharpening, and red-eye correction. Another category of photo editing apps apply filters to images with one touch. An image can be transformed into sepia tone, high contrast, or made to look like an antique. Instagram, the most popular app in this category, has a companion website that boasts over thirty million users. For even more advanced editing, Photoshop Touch, for both platforms, has many of the features found in Photoshop, Adobe's flagship computer application. 

Photo editing can be done directly on a smartphone, or, as I prefer, on the larger screen of a tablet. When I take a photo with my iPhone, it is automatically saved to the built-in Photo app and simultaneously to Photo Stream, which stores the photos in Apple's, iCloud. Android images can easily be transferred between devices with Dropbox or other similar cloud storage services. 

What do I use for photo editing? My choice for quick and simple editing is either Photoshop Express or iPhoto. Both offer basic editing tools for adjusting exposure, cropping, fixing color balance, and sharpening. For more complex edits my choice is Photoshop Touch. Once I am happy with my edits I save the image back to the built in photo app, which simultaneously adds it to the Photo Stream. From there I can chose to display the image on both the iPhone and iPad, and I can upload it to Facebook or my photoblog. 

• Cnet reviews of Photo Editing Apps for Andriod
• Cnet reviews of Photo Editing Apps for iPhone & iPad

• Example of simple photo editing on my PhotoBlog
* Many of the photos on my blog were taken with the iPhone and edited on the iPad. Take a look!