In this next part of the series on mobile photography I want to talk about 3 more apps that I use.

I’ve added a black outline to most shots in this post in WordPress so you can see the borders, the originals are on my Instagram feed.

The original app that got me into smart phone photography (and on to Instagram) was Vignette for Android. It’s relatively simple to use and has some really nice pre-set filters to mimic older film styles including Holga, Diana and Polaroid.

You can also customise the styles (or create a style from scratch) and save it as a preset. The free versions saves a smaller file, the paid version allows larger images to be saved. The main downside is that if you use the in-app camera the app crops from the centre which may not be the best place. So if you want to control the shot, take the image with the normal camera then go into Pixlr or Snapseed and make the crop yourself. Save the image then open the saved image in Vignette.

Before Instagram changed its policy and only allowed square images, I would often get frustrated that I was forced to crop an image that was so obviously better as a portrait or landscape shot.

Then I discovered noCrop – a simple little app that converts a non-square image into a square one by adding a border top/ bottom or left/right (it can also add a border all the way around a square image too). You can change the colour of the border depending on what you think looks best, then just save it. The images are then ready to post in Instagram.

Even though you can post non-square shots now, I’ve got used to the square format and still use this app often.

The final app I want to recommend is ReducePhotoSize – a very simple app that does exactly what it says – it reduces the photo size.  As I mentioned in the previous post, one of my gripes with Snapseed is that you can’t resize the image even though a small file is perfectly acceptable for social media sites.

So I now use ReducePhotoSize in my Snapseed workflow as a finishing step so that I only have to upload a small file onto Instagram or Facebook or whatever.

Next post – the last in this series of 5 on Mobile tools, I’ll talk about some of the hardware that you might find useful.