Top 10: Creative tasks with an iPad

4: Photo editing

Even the best photos can benefit from a touch-up or just a little cropping, while more artistic compositions can be played with extensively for more unusual or surreal results. If you do this on-the-spot with your iPad, you can instantly return to the subject if you need a slightly different shot, or are struck by inspiration in the edit.

If you’ve transferred photos to your iPad with the iPad Camera Connection Kit or an Eye-Fi card (see Onlocation Photo Shoot on page 4), or if you simply want to make the most of the iPad 2’s built-in camera, there’s no shortage of apps for manipulating photos.

First port of call should be Adobe Photoshop Express (free). It’s simple, straightforward and includes all the tools you’ll need to spruce up photos before uploading them to sharing sites: crop and rotate, basic colour correction, a few effects such as Soft Focus and Warm Vintage and a handful of borders. Noise reduction costs £2.49 as an in-app purchase, but seeing how most cameras apply far too much noise reduction while shooting, we wouldn’t bother with this upgrade.

The free Photoshop Express strips photo editing down to its bare essentials

Photogene for iPad (£1.99) is much more sophisticated. Its colour correction has the same exposure, saturation and contrast controls as Photoshop Express, but adds extremely useful lighten shadows, darken highlights and white balance controls. A Heal/Clone brush removes blemishes from photos, and the Masking Overlays section allows a range of treatments including lighten, darken, blur and pixelate to be applied in brush strokes across the image.

Photogene is much more powerful than its £1.99 price suggests

It’s extremely responsive, even when editing 12-megapixel photos on the original iPad. Best of all, adjustments aren’t applied until the image is exported, so it’s easy to tweak the various colour-correction tools in combination, or to undo any edit even after closing and reopening an image. When you are ready to export, it can save a new copy back to the Photo Library or upload to Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, Dropbox and Picasa, resizing photos before uploading if necessary.

We’d be tempted to say that Photogene is the only photo-editing application you’ll ever need – if it weren’t for Snapseed for iPad (£2.99). Its small set of processes are capable of truly stunning results.

Snapseed’s Selective Adjust mode lets you zone in on the parts of a photo that really matter

There’s the usual range of colour-correction tools, but the innovative interface – swipe up and down to change tools, left and right to adjust – and superior processing quality make it extremely rewarding to use. Its Selective Adjust mode allows brightness, saturation and contrast to be applied to a limited selection of the image using a combination of user-defined control points and automatic masking to follow the contours of subjects. Meanwhile, the small collection of creative effects go way beyond the norm, with dramatic HDR-style contrast, vintage film simulation and trendy grunge effects.

One limitation is that it can’t zoom into photos – it appears to generate a low-resolution proxy image, which helps to deliver lightning-fast previews but can make it tricky to fine-tune the selection in Selective Adjust mode. However, with dramatic, stylish photo processing that surpasses any other consumer software we’ve seen on the iPad or elsewhere, it’s the perfect complement to Photogene’s aptitude for precision edits.