The best photo editing app for beginners on iPhone

The two apps to start with

Most beginner advice starts with a download. It should start with the app you already have.

Apple Photos is free, already on the phone, and it has every fundamental adjustment: exposure, contrast, highlights, shadows, black point, saturation, vibrance, warmth, tint, sharpness, plus crop, straighten and perspective correction. Crucially, the sliders are named the same things they are named in Lightroom, Snapseed and every desktop editor. Learning what "highlights" does in Photos means you already know what it does everywhere else. Edits are non-destructive, so Revert always puts the original back, which removes the main reason beginners are afraid to experiment.

Snapseed is the second app, not the first, and it is also free with no subscription. Add it when you want two things Photos cannot do: Healing, which removes a spot or a small object by copying nearby pixels, and Selective, which lets you place a point on one part of the photo and brighten or saturate only that area. Those two tools cover most of the gap between a phone edit and a considered one.

What not to start with: anything sold on before-and-after faces. Beauty and retouch apps are built to be dramatic on the first tap, which teaches you to over-edit before you have learned what a good edit looks like. They will still be there in six months.

Compared: best for, and the real weakness

Judged on how quickly a complete beginner gets a good result, not on feature count.

ShutterAI is not listed because it is our own app and it has not been released yet. A labelled note follows below.

What to learn first, in order

This ordering matters more than the app. Each step fixes a problem the next step would otherwise make worse, which is why photos edited out of order end up looking strange in ways that are hard to diagnose.

1. Crop and straighten. Before any colour work, decide what the photo is of. Straighten the horizon, cut the clutter at the edges, and pick an aspect ratio. Most weak photos are weak because of what is in the frame, not because of the colour.
2. Exposure. Get the overall brightness right. If faces are dark, lift exposure until the face looks correct even if the sky blows out. A correctly exposed face beats a correctly exposed background every time.
3. White balance, using warmth and tint. This is the step beginners skip and professionals do second. Indoor bulbs push skin orange, shade pushes it blue, and fixing that makes the photo look right in a way that no amount of saturation can. See fixing orange skin tones for the version that matters most.
4. Highlights and shadows. Now recover the detail exposure could not hold. Pull highlights down to bring back a bright sky, lift shadows to open up a dark face. Small moves. Pushed far, this is what makes a photo look flat and grey.
5. Contrast and black point. Lifting shadows removes contrast, so put some back. Black point is the more useful of the two, because it sets the darkest part of the photo without touching the midtones where skin lives.
6. Saturation, last and lightly. By this point the photo usually needs less than you expected. Use vibrance rather than saturation where the app offers both, because vibrance leaves skin alone and lifts the rest.
7. Local adjustments. Only now go to Snapseed's Selective or Lightroom's brush and fix the one area the global sliders could not. Brighten a face, darken a distracting bright patch behind it.
8. Healing. Last, because it is easier to see what needs removing once the tones are right. Spots, a cable, a bin, a stranger's arm at the edge.

Filters and presets sit outside this list deliberately. Apply one if you like, then go back through the steps above, because a preset is somebody else's version of steps two to six applied to a photo that was not yours.

The five beginner edits that show

None of these are app problems. They are the five habits that make an edit visible, in rough order of how often they turn up.

• Saturation as a fix for everything. Flat photos are usually a white balance or contrast problem. Saturation just makes the wrong colours louder.
• Sharpening and structure at full strength. Both tools are useful at a quarter of the slider and produce bright halos along every edge at the top of it. If you can see where the effect ends, back it off.
• Shadows lifted to the maximum. Recovering detail in a dark corner feels like winning until the whole photo turns grey and noisy. Lift until the detail appears, then stop.
• Skin smoothing applied to the entire photo. It softens the eyes, the hair and the clothing along with the skin, which is exactly the look people mean when they say a photo looks filtered.
• Editing at night with the screen at full brightness. Your eye adapts, and the result looks dark and over-saturated in daylight. Check any edit you care about the next morning before posting it.

The general fix for all five: make the edit, put the phone down, come back. Editing is mostly a discipline problem rather than a knowledge problem, and every app on this page makes it equally easy to go too far.

When to move up, and what to move to

Three signs you have outgrown the free pair, and what each one points at.

You are editing the same set of photos the same way, repeatedly. That is a preset problem. Move to Lightroom's free tier, build one edit, save it as a preset, and apply it across a set. Our guide on making your photos look consistent covers what should and should not be in a preset.

You keep needing to adjust one specific area precisely. That is a masking problem, and it is the wall Snapseed's control points eventually hit. Lightroom's masking is the answer and it sits on the paid tier, which is the most defensible subscription on this page.

You want to combine two images. That is a layers problem, and only Photoshop on iPhone does it properly on a phone. Its free tier includes layers and masks, so you can test whether you actually need them before paying anything.

If none of those three describe you, stay where you are. A great many people who have paid for editing software for years would produce identical results in Apple Photos and Snapseed, and the gap between a beginner and a good edit is almost entirely the ordering in the section above.

Where ShutterAI fits

This is our own app and it has not launched, so it is here as disclosure rather than advice. The reason it is relevant to a beginner is that it moves the decisions to the moment of shooting: the film and digicam looks render live in the viewfinder, so you see what you are getting instead of trying to recreate it afterwards, and Best Face picks the frame from a burst where nobody blinked.

It comes to iPhone this autumn and is free to start, so it changes nothing about what to install today. Learn the slider order above in Apple Photos regardless, because that knowledge is what transfers. The waitlist is here.