12 Best iPhone Apps For Photo Editing (2023)

The first cell phone cameras were low-resolution, awkward things that were better than not having a camera, but nobody would mistake an image taken by one for one taken by a DSLR. Now images taken by cell phones are of high quality, with contrast, color accuracy, and dynamic range that rivals all but the most expensive digital cameras. Smartphones like Apple's iPhone 14 Pro Max come with multiple camera sensors to get wide, ultra-wide, and telephoto vantage points to frame the best smartphone photos. They also pack in AI smarts, with computational photography to bring more brightness to night shots and wider dynamic range during the day.

Ask any hobbyist or professional photographer, and they'll tell you that creating the best images doesn't end when you press the shutter button. Post-production has always been an integral part of the image creation process. In the film era, that process started with developing the film that was exposed to light to create negatives. Smartphones don't use film, but that doesn't mean they can't post-process images.

Apple coined the phrase, "There's an app for that," when marketing the iPhone 3g in 2009, eventually dedicating a whole section to the App Store for photo editing apps. We've compiled a list of the best photo editing apps for the iPhone. Some are more general, some are for specific tasks, but all are worthy of a place on your device.

Adobe Lightroom in mobile app form is as powerful as the desktop program used on Macs and PCs everywhere. That's because it's essentially the same thing, with all of the tools the desktop app has, all the sync power of Creative Cloud, and a touch-optimized interface that we think is a little bit easier to use than the desktop sliders.

It supports RAW files for the latest iPhone models, has the ability to create your own presets, and has a built-in camera that automatically saves images to Adobe's cloud if you have a subscription. That's a time-saver if you use Adobe on other devices, keeping the same files synced up to work on whichever computer you are on. Lightroom for mobile also has tons of inbuilt content with tutorials to teach you new tricks or how to master the features you already use. The free version has basic editing features for minor corrections and tweaking of contrast, color, and the like. Subscribing opens up selective edits, the healing brush, geometry tools to correct perspective, and the ability to share images on the Lightroom community pages.

Adobe Lightroom is free to download and use the basic features. For $4.99 a month or $49.99 yearly, you get 100GB of cloud storage and access to the premium features. The premium features are also unlocked if you have a desktop Adobe subscription that includes Lightroom, like the $9.99 monthly Lightroom 1TB plan, or the $19.99 monthly Photography 1TB plan.

Hipstamatic Classic is a throwback to the days when iPhone apps all imitated real-world devices, just with touch controls. It's possibly the closest to a physical camera you can get on the iPhone, putting a retro camera onto the screen that you can tap and slide over to take shots. The app is a fun way to feel like making analog images. Choose a lens, a flash, and a film simulation and dive into the camera interface. Use the small viewfinder in the middle of the screen to frame the shot and get snapping. Then it's over to the editing page, where you'll find over 20 pro-level adjustment tools and 12 signature presets. Those include vibrancy, clarity, depth of field, and a deep curve tool for granular control.

The created images appear on a simulated film strip, completing the skeuomorphic experience. The app makes toying with analog film simulations fun and easy while also saving an untouched version of every image that you can edit further at your leisure. The app also has a pro camera mode, which dumps the retro camera experience for a modern affair with manual control over the camera settings. Hipstamatic Classic costs $2.99, with multiple in-app purchases for additional HipstaPaks, which add more filters or camera lens effects ranging from $0.99 to $8.99.

Darkroom is a fully-featured library organizer, image editor, and final image exporter. It's a premium app with a corresponding price. It does allow some functionality without paying, but a license is needed to get the good stuff. The photo library will be familiar to any iPhone user, as it was designed to overlay the inbuilt camera roll. The big difference is that while in Darkroom, the user is always in edit mode without any extra steps to start getting creative. That also means that you don't have to take time importing images into the app; they are already there.

That makes it suited to batch edit, as you can swipe through the images while staying in the same set of editing tool adjustments. It has pro-level adjustment tools, AI depth editing, object detection, and the ability to color-grade video footage. The app doesn't have its own camera features; instead, it links out to specific high-performing camera apps from other developers. These include Halide, Pro Camera by Moment, Camera M, Fjorden Camera, ReeXpose, and ProShot. Each of these apps has varying associated costs. Darkroom is free to download, but premium features cost $6.99 monthly or $32.99 yearly as a subscription. You can also pay a $74.99 one-time fee to gain unlimited access to the app forever.

TouchRetouch is one of the more specialized photo editing tools on the App Store. It was created to remove unwanted elements of any image, and it effectively does just that and not much else. The thing about that is that the phrase unwanted elements can encompass a multitude of photographic sins. Maybe it's a blemish on an otherwise unmarked face or a wrinkle that the portrait's subject would rather not see. Use it like Google's Magic Eraser to remove tourists from your holiday snaps. It has a line removal tool that can erase power lines and other similar modernities from the frame. It can even remove foreground elements, like chain link fences, with a little time and care.

The quick brush tool works like the inpainting tool on other editors, swipe it over the object and watch it get replaced by the surroundings. An object removal tool gives brush and lasso options for selecting larger or irregularly shaped items from the image. There's also a clone stamp image which is handy for replacing larger areas or duplicating objects that you'd like more of. TouchRetouch is $14.99 yearly, with a three-day free trial before you get charged. You can use the app for free but are limited to one exported image daily.

Most photo editing apps let you tweak contrast, exposure, saturation, and other basic adjustment layers to get a particular feel to your images. Mextures does that, too, but the bulk of the app is dedicated to editing in layers to blend textures or effect overlays for dramatic effects. The app has over 150 textures, from grit and grain to gradients, analog light leaks, and film scan effects. These can then be layered over the image, with a "virtually unlimited number of layers,"  according to the developers. Each texture, overlay, light leak, or other layer-able effects can be individually edited with the in-app controls to get the intended effect. The textures have 12 blending modes, which all add up to one of the best texture apps around.

If that level of customizability has your head spinning, the app has a collection of built-in Formulas or preexisting lists of layered effects. These are grouped into categories like Landscapes or Black And White. The app's home screen also has an Inspire gallery with Mexture-created edits to get your creative juices flowing. The app has been around since 2013, but its textures have been around for longer as overlays for iPhone photographers and desktop editors. Mextures is $1.99 to download. Once installed, it has a range of in-app purchases to add additional textures, light leaks, and other overlay effects ranging from $0.99 to $1.99.

The iPhone can create bokeh and blur effects in the Camera app, but sometimes it falls short, and there is no way to control where it will blur. Focos, on the other hand, uses computational photography to create natural-looking bokeh with fine control. It uses the depth information the iPhone's cameras create to unlock an adjustable portrait mode for every image, not just those taken in Portrait mode. Simulate large apertures or smaller ones for natural-looking bokeh, then change the shape of the created bokeh balls to geometric shapes or whimsical ones.

Refocus your images as if they were taken on a light field camera with a single tap. Simulate the output of vintage lenses for swirled backgrounds. Our favorite feature is the ability to relight the scene, controlling brightness, color, range, and shadow. Focos is free to download, with a limited feature set. An unlimited license to unlock every feature costs $12.99.