Best photo apps

If you're bored of taking happy snaps with your digital camera why not download some of these photo apps for your iPhone, all of which help to make taking photos fun again.

1) Hipstamatic - To the horror of real photographers such as Dave Watts, the rank amateur can now take professional-looking, retro-style photographs using vintage film such as Ina's 1969 and BlackKeys SuperGrain Film, expensive lenses such as the Helga Viking and John S and different coloured flashes - all available on Hipstamatic - without splashing out, and without knowing the first thing about taking photos.

2) Fat Booth & Aging Booth - If you have a really gorgeous friend who always takes great photographs, then these apps will help bring them back down to earth. Simply take a picture of said friend, load it into the app, and wait for it to turn her/him into fat or old person. Not flattering for the subject, but very fun for whoever's taking the picture.

3) iSwap Faces - This is an amusing app, providing hours of fun. Take a picture of you and a friend or your mum and dad then swap their faces onto each others bodies using the iSwap Faces app. The results are usually quite alarming, but very funny.

4) Camera+ - Another one to make the professional photographer weep, this app provides a stabiliser to stop blurriness, a high quality zoom, lighting effects, scene modes, flashes, cropping and special effects to make iPhone photos look tip top, with or without particular skill.

5) 3D Gallery - You might not be a famous photographer yet, but you can still see your photos in a gallery, via this 3D Gallery app, which let's you walk through virtual galleries of your own photos.

6) ShakeItPhoto - If you miss the good old Polaroid, and the excitement of watching it develop slowly, then the next best thing must be the ShakeItPhoto app, which works just like it. Shake your iPhone to make each photo download faster.

7) ToonPAINT - You might never have drawn or painted before, but that doesn't mean you can't create a striking portrait or landscape. You just need the help of ToonPAINT, a painting application that lets you colour in your photos to achieve great graphic and painterly effects.

8) Ghost Capture - Save this one for Halloween and freak your friends out in style. The Ghost Capture App, let's you manipulate any photo from your iPhone photo album to include anything from creepy Victorian children, faceless torsos, Civil War Soldiers, ghostly orbs and more. Spooky.

9) AutoStitch Panorama - If you find yourself presented with a beautiful sea, mountain or landscape, but only have your iPhone to hand to capture it, fear not. This app let you create high- resolution, wide-angle shots by stitching all your photos together in any arrangement, including vertical or horizontal or mixed arrangements.

10) Photoshop.com Mobile - Quickly edit and share your photos with the Photoshop app, which makes it easy to improve photos on your iPhone via a variety of one touch effects, plus filters, soft focus or sketch. Undo and redo changes until you get the photo you want, and rest assured that Photoshop Mobile always saves a copy of your original.

Emily Jenkinson

8 June 2010