The Lightroom mobile app is far more powerful, with selective edits for parts of the image, spot healing, and dehaze (which can also add haze).

High-level photo effect filters (many more available as in-app purchases).

Before this development, VSCO made high-quality Photoshop filter plug-ins for pro photographers, but the company has abandoned those products in favor of this social app.

Its a bit more artsy than the dominant photo-sharing app, Instagram, and has long avoided some of that apps peer pressure by not showing Like totalsa strategy that Instagram only recently started testing.

It also offers great looking web galleries for your images, but VSCO lacks anywhere near Flickr or Instagrams social interaction features.

Vsco Photo Editing Professional Photo Filter

As mentioned, the company behind the app has a history with professional photo filter software, most notably Film, which reproduces the looks of analog film photos.

At installation, you need to accept prompts allowing the app to send push notifications and to see your location.

To use the app at all, you now have to create or sign into an accountin the past, you could use the app for photo editing without this step.

As with most apps, you can create an account using your Facebook or Google credentials or with an email address or phone number.

Next, the app asks you to grant access to your photos, camera, location, and contacts.

Across the bottom of the screen are your five app navigation options: Feed, Discover, Studio (the camera part), Profile, and Membership.

In Discover, theres a Flora section (but no Fauna section) that includes animals as well as plants.

Discover offers a search function; when I searched for bird, there was nothing near the wealth of bird photography available on Flickr.

Vsco Photo Editing Free Of The

Thankfully, the service is nearly free of the memes found on Instagram; its more about appealing photos.

These include Editorial, Selects, Humankind, Style, Beach, and more.

You can also search based on tags and usernames on the Discover tab.

That whole process makes for a less quick-browsing and -favoriting experience than you get with Instagram.

Another quibble is that the favoriting star only switches from a black outline to a dark blue outline, so its hard to tell at a glance whether youve favorited a shot or not.

At the outset of this section I should note that the Android version of the apps camera feature has none of the shooting options found in the iPhone version, described here.

VSCO shows that it has learned from apps like Camera, with options such as letting you separately choose focus and exposure points with two fingers to produce on-screen targets.

The app also can save images in raw camera file format, just as Lightroom s mobile app can.

This option gives you more leeway in correcting lighting and color after the shot, since it saves all the information from the camera sensor.

Another disappointment was that I couldnt see effect filters while shooting, as I can in the Flickr iPhone app.

Vsco Photo Editing For Mac