The best selfie app for iPhone, and when you need one at all

Why the stock camera wins, and what the alternatives are for

Third-party camera apps on iOS have a structural disadvantage on the front camera. Apple's Camera app gets first call on the full computational pipeline, which is where most of the quality in a modern selfie comes from: multi-frame merging, the tone mapping that keeps a face lit against a bright window, and the noise handling indoors. A third-party app can request a lot of that, and in practice it often gets a slightly worse frame, particularly in low light.

So the sensible arrangement is to shoot in the stock Camera app and do the interesting part afterwards. That also means a selfie app is really answering one of three different questions, and you should know which one you are asking:

• A camera with a look. You want the photo to come out with grain and colour already applied. This is a film or aesthetic camera app, covered on our aesthetic camera app page.
• A retouch tool. You want to fix one thing: a spot, shine on the forehead, tired eyes, uneven skin under a harsh light.
• A beauty camera. You want a face that has been smoothed and reshaped at capture. Popular, effective, and the most visible category of edit there is.

Only the middle one improves a photo of you without being obvious about it, which is why the rest of this page spends its time there.

Compared: best for, and the real weakness

ShutterAI is deliberately absent from this table. It is our own app and it has not been released. Short note below.

What retouch reads as fake

People are very good at spotting edited faces and quite bad at explaining how. The tells are consistent and they are almost all geometry rather than skin.

Reshaping is the first thing anyone notices. Slimming a jaw, narrowing a nose or enlarging eyes bends everything around the change. Straight lines in the background curve, an ear sits at the wrong height, a shoulder narrows with the face. Nobody consciously registers the jaw. Everybody registers the bent door frame behind it.

Skin without texture. Real skin has pores, fine hair and variation. Smoothing at high strength removes all three and leaves a matte surface that reads as plastic under any decent light. Freckles disappearing between two photos of the same person is the most obvious version.

Eyes and teeth brightened past white. Whitening tools usually apply to a rough oval, so they lighten the gums and the lip edge too. Teeth that are brighter than the brightest highlight in the photo look wrong even to someone who could not say why.

One area smoothed, everything else sharp. Retouching only the cheeks leaves a visible boundary where the texture restarts, particularly along the jaw and the hairline.

The reliable approach is subtractive: remove specific temporary things such as a spot, a stray hair or shine on the forehead, and leave the permanent structure of the face alone. That is what our Facetune alternative page is about, and it is why Snapseed's Healing tool is a better selfie tool than most apps built for selfies.

The app is rarely the problem

Three changes improve a selfie far more than any app, and all three are free.

Find a window and face it. A window is a large, soft light source, and large soft light is what flattens out texture, fills in under-eye shadows and puts a catchlight in your eyes. Stand a metre or two back from it and face it directly. This does more than any smoothing slider and it does not look edited, because it is not.

Get the phone above eye level. Slightly above and angled down is the standard for a reason: it opens the eyes, defines the jaw, and avoids the up-the-nose angle that the natural arm position produces. Not dramatically above, which reads as a 2013 selfie, just a little.

Avoid overhead light. Ceiling downlights, and the sun directly above at midday, drop shadows into the eye sockets and under the nose. If you are stuck under one, step into a doorway or towards a window. Our guide on how to pose for photos covers the body half of this, and mirror selfies covers the version where the phone is in the frame.

Put another way: a good selfie taken in bad light needs a retouch app, and the same selfie taken next to a window needs a crop.

The three iPhone settings that change every selfie

All three are in the stock Camera app or Settings, all three are free, and most people never change any of them.

• Mirror Front Camera. In Settings, Camera, there is a switch that saves the selfie the way you saw it in the preview rather than flipped. Whichever you prefer, the important thing is knowing the switch exists, because the flipped version is why your face sometimes looks subtly wrong to you in photos when it looks fine in a mirror.
• Exposure lock before the shot. Tap on your face, then drag the small sun icon down a fraction. The front camera tends to expose for the bright background behind you, and half a stop down on your face is usually better than any recovery you can do afterwards.
• Burst rather than a single frame. Hold the shutter to shoot a burst, then choose. The difference between a selfie you like and one you do not is usually a tenth of a second of expression, which no app can add later. Our best photo picker page covers thinning the results.

Where ShutterAI fits

Ours, unreleased, so weigh it accordingly. The relevant parts are Glow, a retouch that evens skin while keeping freckles and texture and which deliberately ships with no reshaping sliders at all, True to You, which corrects white balance so skin tone stays right under coloured indoor light, Best Face, which picks the frame from a burst where nobody blinked, and Mirror Mode for mirror shots.

It is coming to iPhone this autumn and free to start, so it is not an option for a selfie tonight. For that, the stock Camera by a window and a Snapseed heal afterwards is genuinely hard to beat. The waitlist is here.