3 Awesome Photo apps for your iPad

Now I know what you’re think­ing — Brad, the iPad does­n’t have a cam­era so why would I want pho­to­graphy apps on it.

Here’s three of many photo apps I use most reg­u­larly on my iPad — start­ing off with an offer­ing from Adobe, the Pho­toshop people.

To illus­trate, I’ve used an image I cap­tured this morn­ing on my wife’s iPhone4, which I then uploaded to Flickr and then down­loaded to my iPad and processed.

There are oth­er ways to get your images into the iPad, such as the Apple Cam­era Con­nec­tion kit, but this seemed the simplest for this post.

Pho­toshop PSExpress

Sim­il­ar to the way a print will move from tray to tray in a wet dark­room, Pho­toshop PSEx­press is the first stop an image makes in my digit­al dark­room on the iPad.

It’s a free app from Adobe, that ties dir­ectly into the free Pho­toshop online stor­age and edit­ing application.

Basic­ally, here I do my ini­tial crop, minor bright­ness, con­trast and col­our cor­rec­tion tweaks, as well as tweak­ing the image align­ment.  There are oth­er effects and fil­ters avail­able, which I may test out on the image, but usu­ally I save that work for the next apps.

Now it’s pos­sible that the image could be fin­ished at this point, and if so, I can either save it back to my iPads Photo Roll, or upload it to my Pho­toshop PSEx­press account, or send it to Facebook.

On to the next ‘vir­tu­al’ tray…

Cam­era Bag
This app has been around for a while on the iPhone, but recently made an appear­ance on the iPad.

Cam­era Bag adjusts 3 ele­ments of the image you’re work­ing with; Bor­der, Crop­ping, and Filter.

Each fil­ter comes with a pre­defined crop and bor­der set­ting, but you can select from each crop or bor­der set­ting as best suits the image too.

Once I’ve got the pro­cessed image look­ing the way I want, Cam­era Bag will either save it to my Photo Roll, or let me email it some­where. It would be neat if it offered integ­rated Flickr, Face­book, or Twit­ter image shar­ing, but that can be accom­plished when the photo makes it’s next dip into the final ‘vir­tu­al tray’.

Instra­gram
This is an iPhone app, that will run on the iPad, but isn’t optim­ized for it. Actu­ally, I use Ins­tagram to quickly share and play with images, but if I’ve got some­thing that i want to dis­play at a much high­er res­ol­u­tion, I’ll not run the image through Ins­tagram, rather manu­ally upload it to Flickr, as Ins­tagram will reduce the size of your image when it shares it.

That caveat aside, Ins­tagram is a fun app for your iPad. Again, you’re deal­ing with Bor­ders and Fil­ters applied to your image, but Ins­tagram’s strength is it’s shar­ing cap­ab­il­ity — allow­ing you to post to Flickr, Twit­ter, Face­book, Tumblr, Pos­ter­ous, and FourSquare, as well as shar­ing them with your ‘friends’ on Ins­tagram’s own channel.

But again, if you’re look­ing to share a high-rez ver­sion, maybe use an app like PixelPipe — at least until a high-rez ver­sion of Ins­tagram shows up — some­thing that Ins­tagram fans have been clam­or­ing for.

Obvi­ously those aren’t the only three photo pro­cessing apps that work well on the iPad, but they’re the three that I use the most. Per­haps I’ll delve into oth­ers in the future, but in the mean­time, if you’re into digit­al dark­room on your iOS device, let me know what you use and why!
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