The cellular operator

Cellphone photography is in a whole new paradigm. Here are some apps that add a dimension to your pictures. Gagandeep Singh Sapra reports.

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August 19 was celebrated as the World Photography Day. With phone cameras becoming sharper and better, and the social pastime of sharing pictures digitally turning into a virtual obsession, it seems as though there will soon be a point of convergence between cameras and mobile devices. A phone that is a camera is even now reality; next may be a camera that doubles up as a phone!

In the current context, there are many mobile phone applications that can make your pictures look more interesting. Let us look three of the most interesting photo apps for smartphones.

Instagram
The mother of all photo applications, which took smartphone photography to a new level and led to the coining of the word iPhonography (since it was initially available only for the iOS platform). Now it has an Android option also.

Instagram lets you shoot pictures, or use pictures from your photo library and apply filters to transform the image, which it lets you upload to the Instagram website and to your social media networks.

The application is a free download for Android and iOS-based phones. If you are a BlackBerry user… you can purchase Instaphotos at ₹ 111 (yes, it is paid app for BlackBerry), which lets you take a picture or use one from your library, apply effects and share on your social network. It is not quite Instagram, but comes quite close.

Molome
When Nokia announced its 41-megapixel phone, it was obviously time for Symbian-based Instagram-like apps to make an appearance. Enter: Molome.

This application is unique in that it has Android, Symbian and BlackBerry versions, but nothing for Apple or Windows.

Molome lets you click pictures and/or use pictures from your library, lets you apply filters and put tags and share on molome.com website as well as your social media networks, much in the manner of Instagram.

It has one big advantage over Instagram — it lets you save the edited pictures into your dropbox account.

Instacam
So your phone runs on Windows. Don't fret, we have a solution for you too. Instacam lets you use 26 effects, has 12 different frames, pre-designed filters, and can share your picture with upto 7 (the maximum of any application) social media networks.

Instacam even lets you view pictures that people have posted on Instagram, and to share Instagram pictures with your friends.

The app is really nice for Windows mobile phone 7.5 or higher. If your phone has an older Windows version, sorry, nothing out there.

An option for all
Pixlr-o-matic (www.pixlr.com), which is free on all platforms, lets you edit your pictures and give them cool vintage and retro looks. It lets you save the image to phone or PC, and share it. If you are using it on your MacOSX or Windows PC, it also lets you take pictures using the webcam.