I have the free version and I don’t pay for the subscription (although I’ve considered trying it for a month and seeing if it’s actually worth it). The best things to use this app for is fixing little blemishes, whitening teeth, de-focusing the background in a photo, brightening eyes or adding focus to specific details in a photo. This is usually the first app that I use to edit my photo, if it needs anything specific. If you want a quick touch up, this app can help with that. All I did for this photo was whiten my teeth and “mattify” my shiny face.

I like to use the “defocus” tool to go over things in the background that I might want blurred out in order to bring even more focus to the points that really matter. This photo isn’t the best example, but it was one that I could show the obvious “de-focusing” effect. See how the first picture you can read the boxes in the background, but in the second you can’t? In my opinion, this doesn’t look great and this isn’t usually the kind of photo I would use this effect with, but for the purpose of showing you how it works, it gets the job done.

It also has an option to use lens flares and other light sources on your pictures. Be warned that some of these look pretty cheesy and fake, but if you’ve got the right picture it might work for you.

But this app goes even further than that, allowing some pretty crazy edits like changing eye size, mouth size, nose size and things like that. But I’m not one for manipulating pictures THAT much…unless I’m doing something like this…

You had to see this one coming. Almost everyone I know uses VSCO to edit their pictures. This is the best app for editing iPhone pictures, in my opinion. You can add filters (my current favorite is HB2), change exposure, contrast, saturation, shadows, highlights, temperature, skin tone, and more! Here are some of my favorite photos that I’ve edited with VSCO and their presets.

Although I don’t really use this app personally that much anymore, it’s one that I used to use all the time. Have you ever been in a situation where you have a vertical picture that you want to post, but when you try to put it on Instagram it cuts off a part of the photo that you really want in it? Cue whitagram. You can upload a vertical picture and it will make it a perfect square for Instagram, adding white (or whatever other color you want) around the edges of the photo.

This is an app that I have downloaded on my phone, but I tend not to use. UNUM is an app that you can use to plan out your Instagram feed, see how the feed will look once your pictures are posted, and even schedule reminders for you to post things. I tend not to use this just because I don’t really take my Instagram pictures in advance, I usually take them and post them immediately so there isn’t much time to “plan”. But if you’re one of those people that enjoy having a cohesive theme to your Instagram, you might want to take a look at what your feed will look like before you officially post them, and this app can help you with that.

This is a great app for overall editing purposes as well (exposure, saturation, contrast, so on) but my favorite part of this app is the brush tool. You can use the brush tool to specifically target one area of your photo and change just the temperature/saturation/exposure (whichever you choose) on that area only.

There is a free version of this to do some editing with, but the really cool stuff is only available in the paid version. In the paid version there’s a tab where you can change the levels of a photo using a curve (if you’re familiar with editing in Adobe Lightroom or a similar you probably would know what this is). There’s also a tab where you can edit specific colors in your photo. For example, if your photo has a lot of grass in it, you could select green and change the hue, saturation, and luminance so that it could brighten or dull the color you have selected. You can do this for each individual color. I haven’t found another app that does that!

This app is crazy cool. In it, you can remove things from your photo and make it look like it was never there in the first place. Take a picture at a tourist attraction and get tons of other people in your shot? You can use this app to select them and remove them from your picture.