You’re reading the Wonder Tools newsletter. I’m Jeremy Caplan, director of teaching & learning at CUNY’s Newmark J-School. Join me for a live short coffee break and to say hello on a new platform next Friday Dec. 11 at 10am ET. Register here.
Got a new phone? Or are you sticking with what you have for now? (I’m still debating whether to upgrade). Either way, here are a few apps that will liven up your photos.
Waterlogue, $5, iOS and Mac Desktop
Watch your photo turn into a watercolor. Pick something from your camera roll and choose a picture style. Some styles, like Color Bloom, are more abstract than others. Once you’ve picked a style, you can adjust the border and darkness of the picture. There’s a desktop version as well.
In addition to Waterlogue, Brooklyn-based Tinrocket —my favorite local app studio—makes several terrific photo apps, including Olli and Popsicolor. Each of these apps takes images you’ve taken, however ordinary, and turns them into something with an artistic feel.
They also make a nifty app called This 👇 — which is a terrible name for anything you’re trying to look up online. It’s a great little tool, though, for adding labels in any photo you have from your tiny phone screen.
Prisma (iOS and Android) Free; extra features for $30/year
Moving beyond watercolors, Prisma can convert photos into a variety of painting styles. The app’s filters make your picture look as if Salvador Dali, Pablo Picasso or Roy Lichtenstein — or dozens of other artists — painted it for you. 120 million users have found value in this one. Prisma Labs now also makes an app called Lensa, which performs some impressive automatic edits to polish up pictures of people.
Catch up: Past Wonder Tools posts here.
Layout (free, iOS and Android)
This collage app spun off from Instagram is a classic I still use anytime I want to combine images on my phone.
Other mobile collage apps ask you to choose the layout you want before selecting your images. Layout has a smarter approach, which is to let you choose the images you want to combine, and then choose from among a bunch of layouts with the images in them, so you can see what the collage will look like and choose what looks best.
If I’m on my laptop I use Turbo Collage, which is terrific and works across platforms.
PopPic (iOS, free, with optional premium upgrade)
This is a fun and easy-to-use iPhone app that’s free. Turn any photo into a 3D image. Open up the app, select an image from your camera roll and suddenly, what seemed before like something flat, now looks 3d. PopPic takes advantage of the iPhone’s depth sensing. My iPhone is a few years old — if you have a newer one, the effect will be even more pronounced. You can take photos within the app for an even stronger effect, but I usually end up using photos I’ve already taken with the built-in portrait mode.
Darkroom (iOS and Mac) Free; optional premium upgrades
For portrait photos with a blurry background, Darkroom is great in allowing you to edit the foreground and background separately. I like adjusting the saturation levels differently to draw attention to elements in the photo, and selecting brightening or darkening parts or adding contrast differently to bring out something special about the primary subject.
Typorama (iOS, Free, or $18 for lifetime pro access)
My favorite app for layering text onto images. Drop text onto any visual and then scrub through to see what different text styles will look like on your image. It’s easy to use and a quick way to make an image for any social platform, presentation or document. Caveat: Typorama’s mobile only. If you want to edit your creations on a laptop/desktop, Canva’s app is handy because it works well across platforms, as does Adobe Spark Post.
If you’ve got a different fave photo app, hit reply or comment to share the link. Or send me something you make with one of these apps. I’d love to see it.
Have a great day, Jeremy
p.s. Join me next Friday Dec. 11 at 10am ET for a short live morning break, and to try out a new Zoom alternative called Run The World. Register here.