Sony Arouje

Every photographer knows that post processing is as important as taking photos. It started from film age and still continues in digital age. I am no different, I do post processing of photos I shot using my DSLR. One thing I am always clear is, I will never alter the composition by adding extra object that’s not part of the initial photo. In my post processing I deal with saturation and blackness, also based on the photo I will apply prebuilt effects like grayscale, vintage, lomography, etc.

One of the biggest advantage of mobile photography is I don’t want to wait till I get back home for doing my processing. I can photograph it and instantly do my processing and can share it with my friends within no time. One of the challenge in editing is finding the right tool, in this post I will explain some of the photo editors I use to do the post processing in my Lumia 920.

All the editor I mentioned below will overwrite the EXIF info of the photo. I think EXIF is really required and the editors should not overwrite it.

Thumba Photo Editor

Thumba Photo Editor is a paid app, a trial version is also available to experiment the functionalities of the app, but we can’t save the photos. I feel it’s worth for the money If you are serious about post processing, so I bought this app.

In Thumba editor, editing functionalities are categorized into Image, Adjustments, Filters and Effects. All the functionality in each category have an inline description as well.

In the Image tab you can see options to Crop, Resize, Red eye removal, adding border etc. In adjustments tab we can find options to adjust Exposure, Saturation, White balance, etc. In Filters tab we can see a list of prebuilt effects like Vintage, Vignette, Lomography, etc. In the Effects tab we can see options for converting image to Oil paint, Night vision, Mosaic, etc, I don’t really use this tab.

One feature I badly need is applying different types of Borders. In Thumba we can apply a plain border in different colors. For applying different borders I use Lomogram.

As part of initial setup we need to change the picture quality settings, other wise Thumba will compress the image and will loose the quality. To change the setting go to Settings->Photo and choose desired JEPG quality. I set it to 100.

Fantasia Painter

Fantasia Painter has a free and paid version. In free version you will get all the features but with Advertisements. Fantasia also provides a lot of features like what I get in Thumba. One of the great feature of Fantasia is it’s Brush. Using Brush functionality you can do Smudging, Lighten or Darken the photos by brushing on top of the image, Erasing the brush strokes and a lot. This painting feature is not available in Thumba editor.

Another great feature of Fantasia is you can choose different supported effects and add or reduce that effect by customizing it. I love this customization feature as well.

As part of initial setup we need to change the JPEG quality, other wise Fantasia will compress the image and will lose the quality. To change the JPEG quality, go to settings and choose the desired quality. To get the settings screen, click on Open/Save button and on the top bar you can see the settings button.

Lomogram

Lomogram is a light weight editing app with filters similar to Instagram. It’s pretty simple to use and free. We can apply Filters, Lighting effects and Border as well as Crop photo. It has 42 filter, 72 Lighting effects, 49 borders (I didn’t count, copied it from app store). I love this tool because of it’s vast collection of Borders. If you want high quality image, change the Ouput quality to high in settings tab, by default it set to medium.

Edit

One issue with Lomogram is, it reduces the picture size. I sent a mail to the developers of Lomogram detailing this problem and below is the reply I got from them.

Thanks for your feedback! Unfortunately, there are two reasons why Lomogram reduces the image size.

1) Current Version has an issue. Maximum image dimensions should be 1200×1200 but they are 1024×768.
2) Lomogram is not yet optimized for high performance devices like Lumia 920 (or 820), so we are reducing image size to decrease "filtering" time (most of filters are making lots of computations)

But we will fix that in future updates 🙂

So if you need a high quality image better stay away from Lomogram until an update that fix the image size issue.

Fotor

Fotor is a simple but elegant photo editing apps like Lomogram. It has features just like Lomogram like Cropping, Filters. One extra feature in Fotor that doesn’t exist in other apps is Tilt-Shift. With Tilt-Shift you can give focus to a specific area rest and will be blured.

Summary

Both Fantasia and Thumba has great photo editing capabilities. Before you invest in the app try it out first and see whether it meets your expectation. I used Lomogram for applying Borders. Taking photos comes first then editing, so invest in a good camera app, see my other post about my favorite Camera apps.