As you may gather from the images on my website I am an avid photographer that uses state of the art equipment to capture them and then post processing in Lightroom and Photoshop CC. I honestly never for a minute thought that I would do what millions of kids have been doing for a while, taking images with my mobile phone, let alone post processing them on that relatively tiny screen. 

You may have noticed that I quietly added a mobile photography folder with images processed on my mobile phone. I gotta confess, while most the images have been taken by me, a handful of family pictures were downloaded from Facebook. Tough thing is, I live in the Cook Islands and my grandchildren in the UK … we’re on opposite sides of the globe. 

My Mobile Technology

Well, things have changed. While my iPhone will never replace my DSLRs, it somehow always seems to be at my side. I am finding that I do not feel that naked anymore when I do not have a DSLR hanging from my shoulders when I’m out and about. Strange feeling.

As eluded to, I constantly have my Apple iPhone i7 with me, not unusual I know. I just wanted to mention that because this post is written based my experience with that particular mobile technology.

Besides the iPhone, I do not use any additional external add-ons such as lenses, filters etc. But I gotta say, while the installed standard camera software may be good, it does not meet my needs. This sent me on a search for something better that would give me more control when taking the photographs.

The Best Mobile Camera App

After an extensive search, >Rant - “some software providers make a huge noise about nothing”< , I found ProCamera (only $5.99 in App Store). Not only is it a camera that gives excellent control to the photographer e.g. exposure, focus, even ability to shoot RAW, it is well supported and is continuously updated with new features.

My Preferred Mobile Image Processing Software

how to create cool mobile imageshow to create cool mobile images While images can be processed in ProCamera, my go-to processing app remains Snapseed (free for both Android and IOS) which was developed by Nik Software and around 2012 was acquired by Google. For the sake of completion, Nik Software is a plugin I use in Photoshop (see my previous post) has moved on from Google and is now owned by DXO.

What makes Snapseed to great? Well, there certainly is much to rave about.

Firstly, it has that Nik Software magic that allows you to select specific areas within an image to adjust it brightness, contrast, saturation and structure. And you can add as many of these local adjustments within an image as you can fit.

Secondly, it has a vast array of tools. It starts with the basic Tune Image which is great with its Ambiance adjustment. Tools I use most often include: 

• White balance for colour correction.
• Curves for a bit more contrast control.
• Crop, Rotate, Perspective and Expand.
• Lens Blur which gives that tilt-shift blur effect.
• Glamour Glow and Vignette for a bit of mood.

Depending on the look I’m going for, from time to time I would use any of the other tools, which include:

• Details, HDR, Drama, Grainy Film, Retrolux, Grunge  and Vintage for extra drama.
• Black and White and Noir for a fine art look.

Then there are several Adobe Mobile Image editing apps that I use. The cool thing about having Adobe products on my mobile, desktop and cloud is the interaction and ease of sharing. Although the apps are free, for the interaction sharing you would need an Adobe Creative Cloud account.

The most often used are:

• Lightroom CC for image editing. The image editing is great with the stand outs being the Profiles, Color, Healing, Geometry and Optics adjustments.

• PS Express for basic image editing and sharing back to my desktop for further processing in PS CC.

• PhotoshopFix brings some great Photoshop tools to the mobile. With tools like Liquify and Healing unwanted elements can easily be altered. Using Smooth, Color and Defocus adjustment focus can be brought to the central element in the image.

• PhotoshopMix brings the most powerful element of Photoshop to mobile … Layers! And these layers include Blend modes and opacity adjustments. Each layer can be adjusted independently as in its big mama Photoshop. This is awesomely powerful.

One thing you will need to adjust to when using PhotoshopFix and PhotoshopMix is your big finger being the pointer on a tiny screen. It tends to be in the way at times … hehe.

How I Share My Creations

Now when you wanna share your mobile image and want to add something special Adobe Sparkle has the magic you’re looking for. 

It makes creating awesome post designs, including layout, color, font etc, so easy. The images in my mobile folder with a design element have all been created with Spark. Spark also offers different design sizes for all application types including social media platforms. And it makes it easy to share your creations to those platforms.

An Adobe Design Tools That Helps You Find Design Elements in Everyday Life

AdobeCapture is a crazy tool that can help a designer to:

1. Take a picture of something and transform it into a vector image. Then share it Illustrator or Photoshop on all your devices including mobile.
2. Identify a Type/font simply by taking a picture and it will be matched to whats available in Adobe Typekit. Select it and it will sync all your devices.
3. Select color from whatever your eye (through your mobile camera of course) can see. Create thousand of color themes then sync to your applications.
4. You can take pictures of surfaces to create 3D materials.
5. Create kaleidoscope type pattens from what you can see through your mobiles camera lens. 
6. Create brushes the same way.

All the Apps mentioned above are available in the Apple App store.

Go check them out.

Play with them.

I promise you that once you get used to these handful of tools you would not want to go with out them.

What an interesting world this mobile is turning out to be.