Mobile Apps for Editing Social Media Photos

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Create Social Media Photos With These Four Apps

Thank you for listening to The Photo Flunky Show, episode 35.

We discuss four of the most popular mobile apps for editing and creating social media photos.

  • Word Swag
  • Typorama
  • Font Candy
  • Adobe Spark Post

All of these apps are available for free, but most of them have an in-app purchase of about $5 to unlock all of the features.

Lee and I discuss our favorites, which apps can create images for the social media platforms that you want, and some of the unique features of each app. You may want to get more than one to cover all the bases.

There’s also a stinker in this pile that really disappointed us. We’ll talk about the problems it has and what could be done to fix it.

 

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Transcript

Thank you for joining the Photo Flunky Show, Episode number thirty-five.

Today we’re going to be talking about mobile apps for editing your social media photos.

William:   Hi, thanks for joining us on the Photo Flunky Show, episode number thirty-five.  My name is William Beem.

Lee:         Hi, I’m Lee.

William:   And we really appreciate you being here.  You can find show notes available at williambeem.com/episode35  There’s a free transcript of the show there and, of course, you can find links to subscribe at photoflunky.com.

Today we are going to be talking about mobile apps; things for your smartphone and sometimes they will work on tablets as well, like iPads or other kinds like Samsung Note or things like that.  But primarily we have iPhones and we are going to be looking at them on iOS devices and what we are talking about with mobile apps for social media editing are those things that are making use of your photographs or maybe some other backgrounds and that have something to say on them.  Maybe it’s a quote, maybe it’s information that you want to share, but there’s a number of tools out here.  We’ve picked about four of them and we are going to go through them and give you our thoughts on them and see if it might be something that helps you out for creating a perfectly sized graphic for your social media platforms.

Why don’t we go ahead and get started with the first one out here: Wordswag.  As soon as you start it up it makes this sound.  I don’t even know what that sound is supposed to be or why it’s there. I haven’t found a way to turn it off.  It’s OK.  Once you get in there, then it shows you a few examples of the kind of things that you can do.  There are different layouts for your type and font and that is what these apps really do for you.  They will work with either your photos or ones that are available for search and all of the apps seem to be using the same search engine for free photos that you can use from Pixabay.com.  I’ll go search for ‘dog’ and I found the same photos of dogs on the front page on every one of them.

When you start off with Wordswag, right off the bat you’ve got an option.  There are two buttons down there.  One is a camera if you want to take a photo and the other one looks like a Polaroid kind of thing and you can tap on that for existing photos.  Then you just kind of find what image is going to work for you.

There are some defaults out there that are kind of plain backgrounds, some colors, some with some smoky mountains or a sunset scene over the beach.

Lee:         I think that is for the people who are concentrating on putting text or a saying of something – a quote – on there. It gives a clean background.

William:   You can do a transparent background if that’s what you need, as well.   So I’m actually going to try that. I’m going to select a transparent background and then once you’ve got that, it takes you to the next section where you can put in your message.  This is kind of where you get a little bit of help.  Actually, more than a little bit of help.  One of the things I like about it is one, it’s easy to change your message.  You just double tap on the screen.  You can use Custom, which lets you type in whatever you want to and there’s a part underneath that says (it’s optional) “Says Who”.  In other words, if you’re putting in a quote, you can give credit to the person who did the quote.

Underneath that there are categories for other quotes and they give you a number of options.  So classics, one here that just came up from Helen Keller, is “Life is either a great adventure or nothing.”

So this way you get all these trite little sayings that you see all over Facebook and Instagram.

I’m not a big fan of putting out quotes from other people, because usually when I see someone put that in their social media, the first thing that comes to my mind is you didn’t have an original thought.

Lee:         I’m not interested in quotes.  I’ll say it right off the bat because I’ve got nothing at stake here. I mean, if people start posting too many shared quotes and things, I kind of remove them from my feed because it irritates me.  It does nothing for me.

William:   Exactly.  It’s unoriginal.  It’s like you’re trying to share someone else’s thought as, maybe not necessarily your own, but for your audience to inspire them.  I guess that’s another one of my little pet peeves.  I don’t believe that you inspire people.  I think that people are inspired when they see something that inspires them.

Lee:         Yes, which is usually something that somebody else has come up with themselves, not something someone got from who knows where.

William:   Yeah, we’re both of the same mind here. All these other quotes down there ... it’s not that I dislike quotes. I love reading quotes and learning from other people’s experiences; I just hate them thrown at me on social media.

Lee:         But this is why I like these little apps. I mean although I don’t like quotes, I like the fact that I can say my own, because I want to speak my own mind.  So if I’m using my photo and putting my quote in there and designing it myself, that’s an original.  You should be stopping and looking at that.

William:   Well, exactly.  And do you remember the one you did with the wine glasses?

Lee:         Yes. That was quite a favorite.  I like my wine and I like running so I took a photo of a glass of wine one night and I put there, “I’m an economy runner.  200+ miles per gallon.”  Yeah, it did quite well.

William:   Yes, but it did well because it was original.  People hadn’t seen it before.  They hadn’t come across that line and it was yours.

Lee:         Yes it was. I didn’t expect it to be so popular, but people liked it.

William:   But it was true.  Exactly.

There are plenty of quotes out there that will pull for you, but my own taste and apparently Lee’s as well is do something original. And it does give you an option here to do something original.

Lee:         Well, I think that’s the beauty of these apps.

William:   Now once you’ve done that there are a couple of little sections down here. Underneath the text style it’s changing the way it’s choosing typography for you, and the layout of the typography.  So you’ll find a number of categories that will show and example of what you want and underneath that there’ll be five numbers, one to five and then there’s a pair of dice.

Lee:         Oh that’s the best!

William:   You hit the dice and it will just shake it up and redo it in a number of different layouts for the style of type that you’ve chosen.  The apps are typically free and there’s an in app purchase, but I think it’s like five bucks for the in app purchase and I just went ahead and bought it and then you unlock different text styles. But it’s so much nicer and you don’t have to worry about, oh now I need to buy this one and that one.  Just buy the thing.  It’s $5.

Lee:         Yeah and the unlocking is pretty easy.  All they ask is that you like one of their social media pages, which I didn’t mind doing because I’m using the app.  So I liked that and then after that you’re kind of into pretty much anything that’s on there, if you’ve got the paid one.

William:   You can unlock a couple of them and social media likes will do that for you.  Some of them are going to be necessary paid options to unlock things. I think it’s worth it because you never know exactly what style you want and having all the styles available to you without any restrictions just makes you free to send the message that you want to send.

In addition to those type styles there’s a color section and what we are really looking at here are textures and colors that I think of as cross processing.  Like if you’re going into Lightroom and you’re doing cross processing there are a number of colors in here and it will just change the way your text and your photo and background image looks.  And that is pretty common among most of these apps and you can change the transparencies and you can invert them on Wordswag.

The one thing that is a little bit different for me on Wordswag compared to the others is you either accept the photo with the dimensions that you uploaded or you crop it into a square crop.

Primarily, this one seems to be intended for a square crop; something you’re probably going to put on Instagram.

Lee:         It is.  Look Wordswag is my favorite because it’s really the only place that I am posting things that I create in one of these apps so I don’t lose anything. You can put in a photo that is cropped for a different dimension.  The idea then is to load it up into the app already at the size and in the format that you want it because I think you’ll have the gaps on the top and bottom.

What is nice about Wordswag is when you’re positioning things it gives you a little gridline marker where it will show you where the preview area is for Twitter. I’m not sure if it does it for any of the others like for Facebook?

William:   It does that.  So as I’m moving the text around I can see in the background it will say “Twitter Preview Area.”  And you will see a dotted line showing the grid outlining where Twitter is and where it starts and ends. It helps you align your text and if you want to use this for Twitter you put your text in that area so even though it’s a square crop, when it shows up on Twitter the area that you’ve aligned it within the app, it will ignore the top and bottom parts of the square.

Lee:         What I really like about that is if you are going to share it from Instagram it helps to have that because otherwise if you upload a post onto Twitter or Facebook, that platform will decide how it crops it, which is not always appropriate.  So you want your eye-catching piece to be somewhere where you’ve decided you want it to be.

William:   I was talking about the little color styles in there.  It varies.  Some of them are solid colors, so for  example, if you know that you’re going to want a yellow, green, purple or a number of other colors that are in here, everything in your text is going to have that kind of cast to it.

Then as you get down towards the end there is a black and white and then there are some with three or four colors on them and you start seeing that your text will alternate colors between lines.  There are crossed arrows on there.  What that is telling you is to tap it again and it will start changing up the way that shows.  It’s a handy app.  If you’re going to be doing primarily Twitter and Instagram, I think Wordswag is probably the one to use.

Lee:         Yeah, those are really my only two. I’ve kind of fallen away from Facebook for the most part in the last year, so this works fine for me. I think if you are a Facebook poster... well, actually that’s not a problem because on Facebook, if you share that from Instagram to Facebook it will show the whole photo, so I guess maybe that’s why it’s not such a big deal.

William:   Well, when you get to the share section of it, it lists off here. You can share this on Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, Pinterest, text or email.  You can add your own logo or watermark if you want to do that. I’ve never bothered with it.

Lee:         I haven’t bothered with it. If people want to share my stuff, help yourself.

William:   If it’s going on social media it’s meant to be shared.

Lee:         Well, exactly!  If you like it, enjoy.

William:   The next one we are going to look at is one called Font Candy or Font Candy Plus because, again, I went ahead and bought the whole thing.  It’s going to start off and show you your camera roll, but you can just swipe to the side and it will look at some of your social media stuff.  So it will show me all the photos I’ve got on Facebook, Snapseed, Instagram, and then of course there are ones that I’ve made specifically in Typorama.  So basically it’s got your photo stream.  It’s got access to the things that your phone can access.  So you can choose those or like anything else, you keep swiping and it will eventually get to a section for a search.

OK, and search is pretty boring and blank. It looks like a black screen and then once the bar comes up you just go in there and type in, like I said, I searched for “dog”.  You can also take your own photo and they’ve got a button down here called “Inspiration” which is showing a cat on a pillow that says “I like to party and by party I mean nap.”  Apparently their inspiration is a lot of cat photos and a donut that someone has eaten!

Alright, I’m not inspired by these things so that’s kind of the example of when I say that inspiration when other people show me what is supposed to inspire me, it doesn’t work.

Lee:         No, but that’s us.  I think there’s a big fan base out there for that, so if it appeals to your audience, you could probably have a lot of fun with this app working on that.  It’s not necessarily what you like, it’s what your audience is wanting.

William:   Exactly.

Lee:         Fortunately ours I don’t think are looking for clever quotes written by somebody we can’t identify with a picture taken by somebody unknown.  And shared by us.

William:   Now, this one is a little bit different. Instead of starting off with just either the original photo size or a square crop, you’ve got a number of different options here.  So it will start off with the original size, but you’ve got a crop for Instagram, Facebook Cover, Twitter Post, iPhone Wallpaper and then it does some dimensions like 3:4, 4:3, 16:9 or 9:16 and the same thing with 3:2 or 2:3.

Lee:         The typical options. Yes.

William:   So whether you want to do these dimensions either landscape or portrait mode, they give you a number of options.  And I kind of like that.  Especially the 16:9 because most of the photos I’m going to posting on my blog are going to be 16:9 and sometimes I might want to grab that off of my iPhone rather than something that I’ve processed in Lightroom.

The other thing is I think you get a really good look with these crops rather than what you saw on Wordswag. If you want to do something on a Facebook cover, that is really wide, but the height is kind of short format.  So I’m looking at a photo of a dog, of course.  And the dog just doesn’t fit in there. I can see his smiling face or I can see his feet. You can’t get both into a Facebook cover photo.

You’ve got to play with the dimensions of where you’re going to put it and that helps you choose the right photo for what you’re going to do.

So let’s say I’m going to do an Instagram post and it’s square, so I’ll just go ahead and bring the dog over here so he’s nice and happy and then it’s the same thing.  You double tap to get your message and you can type whatever you want.

Lee:         I found the text box on Font Candy is a little bit more fiddly to use. I think that the app as a whole, although my go-to is Wordswag because of what I’m doing, I think that Font Candy actually gives you a lot better options. I think it possibly is the better app if you are trying to do something a little bit more than just Instagram posts and maybe sharing to Twitter, which is all I’m doing.

So I think Font Candy is definitely worth having a good look at it first before you dismiss it, even though I haven’t noted it as my favorite. I can acknowledge that this is maybe the better app.

William:   I honestly like having all of these apps on here because each one does something either differently or has a different feature or availability set than the others.

Now inside of Font Candy you’ve got a font manager so you can turn on and turn off which fonts appear for you.  That’s kind of a nice thing because there are some fonts over here that I know I’m never going to use and what you do is you see a vertical list in here and you can add fonts to it, but if there is a font that you’re never going to use, you just flip off a little switch and it’s not going to show up and bother you again.

Lee:         It’s like clearing out a filing cabinet. It’s just easier to find the stuff that you do want.

William:   Yeah. So once you’ve got that you choose your font so you see your photo and you’ve got a couple of options.  The first one is going to be the letter A and that’s going to show you your list of fonts.  The next one is going to be a few sliders so you can change the size of the font, you can change the shadow like put a little drop shadow on it. That was something we didn’t see in some of the other apps.

Lee:         No, I don’t think the others have it.

William:  And it gives you options for character spacing, line spacing and curve. For example, I did a photo of a security dog out at Walt Disney World and I can just slide on curve and it will just take the words – I put in “Happy Dog” – and it just kind of put them on an arc.

Lee:         That’s actually a nice feature on this app as well, and something that’s missing on the others that we have tested for review.

William:   And you can rotate your text so if you want to have something written sideways rather than just straight left to right, it gives you options for those and I think that’s a nice touch.

The next line over is going to be a choice for how you want to align your type. So it could be left, center or right aligned and beyond that there is an eraser so if you want to erase things, you can.

Then let’s go down to this last one. You can flatten your layers, so that’s a nice little feature as well. So this is working kind of like Photoshop. You’re building layers up and then you flatten everything down and save yourself a little space.

Lee:         Another thing that this one allows you to do that you aren’t able to do on some of these others that we are going to review after this as well, is that Font Candy lets you put in more than one text box.  You can duplicate a text box or you can put in another one and then edit the text and the font and everything.  The others I found I had to save the image first onto my device, then open it up and load back into the app, add the next box and then save it.  So it was kind of extra effort.  This one will allow you to put in multiple boxes.

William:   One of the nice things I’m looking at here is it has blend modes for your type.

Lee:         Oh, those are pretty cool!

William:   So for example, all the blend modes that you’re used to seeing in Photoshop – if you want to do a multiply, difference, screen, overlay, lighten and on down the line – those options are available to you. So that’s why I’m saying you can flatten them because you can put your text in there as layers and then choose different blend modes. That’s actually quite a nice feature, I think.

And then finally at the end, there is a check basically saying shake your device to undo the last action.

Lee:         It works.  It does work. Yeah, it’s like a shuffle.

William:   But you know, you can go ahead and save it and then once you’re ready, hit the sharing button, it will blend the image in there and it will save it to your phone’s library and of course then you can share it off to Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr.... here’s one I don’t know. Kite.Lee.

Lee:         I have no idea. I’m obviously old and not with it.

William:   That’s probably the same with me.  And it says you can make a T-shirt out of it, you can mail it, send it as a message and other apps. I think you can send it off to some of your other photo editing apps if you want.

Lee:         Make a T-shirt?

William:   Make a T-shirt. It says right there: “Make a T-shirt.”

Lee:         Oh, stand by for selfie T-shirts.

William:   Who knows? Instead of putting this stuff on social media you can put it on your chest.

Hey, it’s right there. Make a T-shirt.

OK, that’s kind of our quick coverage of Font Candy. It is different than Wordswag and it’s different than Typorama, but I liked some of the options in there so again, these things, one will do things that the others don’t.

Alright, we’re going to jump ahead now to Adobe Spark Post.  This one is a free app from Adobe. I’ve got to say, this is my least favorite app.

Lee:         It would be mine, too.

William:   It starts off with categories for seasonal craft business and travel, food and lifestyle.  You’ve got a number of featured images here; I guess things that other people have put in place.  And you can remix the stuff that you’ve done, but let’s start off and I’m going to try and hit the plus button at the bottom and I’m going to choose something from my photo library.  The nice thing this has is, if you’re an Adobe subscriber, it has an option there to get your photos from Lightroom or from Creative Cloud. That’s actually a handy thing for a number of people.

Lee:         It’s useful.

William:   If you know you’re going to have a lot of images and as long as you’re syncing up your library, you’re going to have a lot of images available to you, of your own.  And that is helpful.

So let’s pick something here. Old Sorcerer’s Hat photo from Disney Hollywood Studios from before it was gone.

Once you get in there, again, you’ve got your normal options. You’ve got the original size and then there are the social media options for Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, a Facebook Ad, a blog post and then for your profiles you’ve got Facebook cover, Twitter header, LinkedIn cover, YouTube thumbnail and Etsy cover.  And then there are a couple of standard sizes for squares and 2:1 and I’m not going to read them all off because it’s the same things we’ve been discussing before.

So I think as far as dimensions, this one gives you more options than anything else does and some of them are pretty useful.

Let’s do a Twitter header.  We haven’t done that.  A Twitter header is really hard to do because that is even more narrow than what we had before on the Facebook header.  You know what? I’ve just decided I’m not going to choose that. Let’s choose a Twitter post instead.

Hit the next button beneath it.  Same kind of thing.  You’ve got text that shows in the middle that says, “Double tap to edit.”  When you double tap on that it doesn’t offer you anything for quotes. It just basically gives you a blank little spot in there and you can edit your text.  It’s simple, easy and done.

Now you’ve got choices between how you’re going to make that text come alive and it’s going to say you’ve got options to change the color, you’ve got options to change the font, the shape, alignment, opacity and spacing, kind of as we did with some of the other apps.

If we look at color, there are some rather mundane suggestions.  Then there are pairs of colors.  Those are the ones I was thinking that are kind of like cross processing. And as you do that, it’s only affecting the text that you put in there, and then of course there’s an array of basic colors that look almost like paint samples.

Nothing is really jumping out and coming alive to me.  I’m going to choose one of these cross processing ones, put it in there and then look at the fonts.  You’ve got a number of font choices in there, but they are broken into categories like whether it’s going to be decorative, it’s going to be elegant, modern ....

Lee:         I do like that. It makes it easier to look for the type of font that you want – the style.  That was something they’ve got going for them.

William:   I think it does as far as it’s good if you are choosing the same font that you want to use throughout the whole thing.  But it’s not changing the layout at all, and that’s kind of what’s bothering me about this.  So let’s say I chose Jolly.  That’s an ugly font. Let’s go with ugly.

And then you can look on shape.  Shape is going to be putting things out here.  That’s going to affect your layout.  So I’m going to hit the circle and all that does is basically obliterates my photo and puts a circle of color out there.

Lee:         I didn’t bother with the shapes. I found them really stupid and they were just a pain in the butt.

William:   Yeah, the shapes aren’t really that handy. There are some banners out here. You’ve got shapes and banners, you’ve got decorative stuff so you can put little frames around it and you can put in icons for Facebook or whatever.

Honestly, to me this is the least useful of the layouts for your text.

Lee:         Yes, this one has got a way to go yet. The options look nice; they’ve got this nice little selection and you think you’ve got a whole lot from which you can choose, but when you start to apply it to your photo practically, very few of them work. I find them a lot more limiting.

William:   They’ve got an odd thing down here.  At the very bottom row there is a trash can to delete it, there’s a check mark when you’re done and a thing to edit it, but there is a circle with a little dot in it and if you hit that circle and you move the dot within the circle, that’s what’s going to change your text layout.

Lee:         Yes.

William:   But it doesn’t do anything that I find interesting.

Lee:         And it’s also not apparent what it does. So they almost hid this away and if you didn’t want to watch the how-to video, you won’t know about this.

William:   Yeah, there’s nothing about this ...

Lee:         We figured it out because we’re nosy.

William:   Yeah, it’s not an icon that you would recognize that’s used anywhere else.  It overwrites whatever font you have selected.

Lee:         Yes.  That’s the other thing.

William:   And it’s just going through a couple of different layouts, but like I said, none of them are interesting to me, but that’s a matter of taste, I presume.

Anyways, you can choose one of those and hit the check mark and you’re done.  But when you get done with this, before you even post it out there, you are going to see at the lower corner on the right hand side there is a hashtag Adobe Spark.  In other words, it’s got a watermark on there from Adobe.

Lee:         Yeah.

William:   You can get rid of the watermark by sharing this on social media, which I find incredibly stupid.  The reason that you are creating these things is so that you can make something that you want to share on social media and you don’t want to share it with Adobe Spark on the bottom of it.

Lee:         No, but you have to share it first with Spark on it so you can share it again without, right?

William:   Yeah, and that’s just absurd!  It defeats the entire purpose of why you want to create social media images to share.

Lee:         What if you shared it – this is just a thought and I don’t know if anyone has tried it – what if you shared it and you change your audience selection, say on Facebook, to who can see it? Only Me.  Does that count as a share, or do you have to share it publicly or with all friends?

William:   I’ll have to go back and read again just to make sure because it’s mentioned on Adobe’s page, but I think it has to be a public share.

Lee:         Quite honestly, although I am quite happy to let people use their watermarks and do a bit of advertising, I kind of feel that it would be better to charge for this app and for those who are already Adobe Creative Cloud members, as we are, I just think they’ve got one hell of a cheek to tell us how and where we have to advertise.  And if we want to get rid of their watermark, when there are other apps that actually do even more than this, I’m kind of politely flipping you off!

William:   I’ve been onto Adobe’s support page for this. There is a nice long thread over there with a number of people saying essentially the same thing. It’s like this is absolutely no good to me with your tag on there because I’m sending my own message. I don’t need to send Adobe Spark out to my audience.

The folks from Adobe have been mostly quiet about this, but they have said “We are listening to you. There is a way to do it.”  (Mentioning the share out there).  It is a free app; it is not part of Creative Cloud so the other folks have said the same thing. I’m a Creative Cloud member and Adobe is saying, “Well this isn’t part of it so we don’t care.”

I think the last post that I saw out there is suggesting that they are going to come out with something else.  They are hearing the feedback, I believe, and they are going to come out with something else to get rid of that. I don’t know if it’s going to be something that you paid for or if it’s going to be part of Creative Cloud or something entirely else.  Maybe it’s something even dumber than sharing it to your audience before you’re ready to share it to your audience.

Lee:         I just think it’s silly. It’s like going somewhere and paying for a full all you can eat breakfast buffet and then you ask for an extra slice of toast for a baby and they turn around and say that’s not included.  I mean, they are doing the equivalent.

Are you going to be that petty about it?  It’s not part of Creative Cloud!

William:   Yeah, it’s a free app, it’s one that honestly I don’t think is worth it, mostly because it doesn’t do as much as the other apps that are out there and it requires you to have Adobe’s hashtag, Adobe Spark, the first time that you share it.

Lee:         I agree. To be fair, there might be more that it does do. I haven’t taken the time to explore because the hashtag is such a deal breaker for me that I feel I can do more elsewhere. I’m not even going to waste my time on there.

William:   Oh, I’ve explored it. I’ve looked through it and trust me, you can do more with Wordswag, Font Candy or the next one we are going to talk about, Typorama.

Lee:         OK, this is yours because I haven’t actually tried this. I’ve watched you using it, but I’m not really able to give personal experience on here.

William:   I think Typorama is pretty fun as well.

It starts off with choosing a background and again, it gives you some rather mundane textures, but you can also search.  So I’m going to go in here and search for my favorite word: dog.  Dog. Atomic Dog.

Alright, we’re going to get a nice photo of a Labrador with a big pink tongue. I know you can’t see it, but I’m still going to do it.

OK, so you’ve got a photo out there and this guy has just got those eyes burning into my soul.  So you can do this with the original size and again, you’ve got cropped sizes.  So Instagram, Facebook post, Facebook cover, Twitter post, you can do wallpaper for an iPhone 4, or iPhone 5 and 6.  They have got an Apple Watch wallpaper and then of course there are a number of different sizes from 3:2 and 5:4 and on down the line.  So you can do your square crops in here as well.  So you choose a size that you want.  I’m curious about the Apple Watch because I don’t have that, but I’m not going to go into that.

Let’s just go with a Facebook post.  We haven’t chosen that one yet.  So it shows you the crop lines and you can crop your photo just by pinching, just like with all the other ones.  This one is a little bit different. I’ve kind of complained about the others that I can always zoom in, but I couldn’t zoom out.  This one actually lets you zoom out, which means that you’re going to end up with some empty lines on the side, but if you want to fill those out or do something else and put a background behind it, I think you can do that.

So I’m going to put this dog’s head somewhere in here that makes sense without trying to cut off his tongue, because that is a really long tongue.  And when you’re done with that, you just go ahead and say “Done” and now that you’ve selected your photo and cropped it the way you want to, then you’ve got the options to go ahead and do all your styling.

So there are text styles, text tools (which will let you change your opacity, position, x and y) but it’s also got a gradient and a 3D rotate. Some of these tools are different than what you see on the other apps.  You can change all the colors. There is plenty of variety of solid colors; you swipe them along the bottom line.  Then there are filters.  Filters are kind of like the Instagram filters.  They are just really atrocious.  But a lot of people like atrocious so if that’s what you want, there’s black and white, there’s a chrome, there’s sandwave, which is really a what would you call it? Just kind of a flat look?

Lee:         Well, if you want to dilute some dirty water and wash it over everything ... it looks like you’ve spilled coffee on your picture.

I can see how it could work for some things, actually.  I mean when you had it over the dog I could see that there are places where that could work.

William:   OK, so the filters, think about it as just the way you are tweaking your photo. Then you have overlays. Let’s say there’s one here that’s just a picture of bokeh with different colors in it.  So I’m looking at the dog and he’s surrounded by a bunch of bokeh bubbles and then you’ve got an intensity slider so you can kind of fade that out.  So you can go from just the photo of the dog to putting in a soft light overlay, if you were to do this in Photoshop.  And you can determine from intensity just how much opacity you’d like to have on it.

Of course adjustments will let you do basic adjustments for the photo as far as your brightness, exposure, contrast and vibrancy and even a vignette if that’s what works for you.  And yes, it will let you do the ugly frosted white vignette instead of a darker color vignette.

And last, you have an option for a watermark on there.  You can design one in the app or you can add one from your photo gallery, if you have something.

And then once you’re done with that, you hit the button that says OK, Share. Then you get an ad for their new app called Videorama. So we’re going to skip that. You can add it to your gallery, which is basically your saved photos, and then it’s got buttons on here to save off to social media, so Instagram, Facebook, Messenger, Whatsapp (that’s a different one than we’ve seen), messages, Twitter and Pinterest, email and then there’s a button at the bottom for ‘other’ in case you just want to share it to the usual built in stuff for iOS.  You can send it to any of the apps that you’ve got it configured to go there.

And that’s about it. You can reuse this app and kind of mix it up again.

I like this one.  Again, it does some things that the others don’t and there may be times that you might want to use a couple of these apps just to get your message just right.

Lee:         I was going to say, some of them do things that others don’t. They all have different strengths.  With the exception of Adobe Spark, which honestly ... seriously? Don’t bother.  It’s just, in my opinion, a waste of time.

I just wanted to mention, some people might not be aware of this, but if you are Canva fans, Canva has just launched the app for mobile. I know it is out in the app store and it’s free for iPhone. So if you want to put it onto your iPhone.  I did have it on the iPad, but there was not an app for the iPhone.  The iPhone app is now out.

I’ve had a brief look at it; I couldn’t review it very much.  It looks a little bit more fiddly on a small screen and it doesn’t seem to have all the options, so my preference is probably going to be to stick with one of those we’ve reviewed today for right now, but I do like Canva. Until they kind of tweak things out and get this fully launched, I think I’ll be sticking to the laptop though, for my editing with that.

William:   I think so too, for the Canva stuff.  And I really do like Canva. I went ahead and got the Canva for Work and that has actually been kind of helpful for me. So that was worthwhile. I don’t know that everybody needs to get Canva for Work, but we are trying to do something with building a brand for a couple of our properties and it made sense to do that.

Lee:         Yeah.

William:   Overall though, I have no problem recommending Wordswag, Font Candy or Typorama.  Adobe Spark Post is not ready. Until or unless Adobe removes that watermark, I agree with Lee.  Don’t even bother to get it.  And even then, it was still the least useful.

Lee:         It really was.  It allowed you to do the least. And it was a little bit clunky. It was just fiddly. I found that I was fiddling around to do things and I couldn’t do as much with it. A little bit more frustrating.

William:   The other three are actually fun to play with.  You can go there and you can do a lot of what ifs.  I can change things around.

Wordswag I like; my only hesitation with that one is that it is really designed for square crops. It is really an Instagram tool.

Lee:         Yes, which is why it became my go-to. I think I mentioned before it’s my go-to so when I say it’s my favorite, it’s just because I’ve got into the habit of using it.  Font Candy actually does a better job, it’s just that I don’t have the need for the extra flexibility right now.  But I’ve kept it installed on my phone because I do appreciate that it’s a really good app.

William:   My recommendation is – we’ll put links to each of these in the show notes – but my recommendation is try out the free versions, see which one you like as far as the way it works and then go ahead and buy the in app purchase stuff.

Lee:         Get them all.  Except for Adobe Spark Post! Then pay for the one that you think is going to best suit your needs and keep the other free versions.

William:   Oh, absolutely.

Lee:         That’s also an option.  There are just some little things that some do better than others.

William:   Try before you buy.  You don’t pay for Adobe Spark Post and it’s worth every penny that you don’t pay.

Lee:         Totally!

William:   I am sorry. Actually, I’m not sorry.  Adobe has plenty of resources. They could build a good app.

Lee:         I think that’s what got me. I mean, Adobe? We expect more from Adobe! Or do we? Yeah, we do.

William:   I do, because you can see what the competition is doing and they are not up to the level of the competition - people who have far less resources than Adobe. This is an entry level effort.

Lee:         Use the word effort very loosely.

William:   Yeah, I’ve got no recommendation for Adobe Spark Post.

The other ones I’m happy to recommend any of them and like I said, load them up, get the free versions and see which ones you like and then if you like one enough that you want to use it, I say get the in app purchase so that way it unlocks the other type styles that you want and go from there.

William:   Thank you very much for joining us today on episode thirty-five, where we talk about social media editing apps.  If you’ve got an opinion, there are other apps that we did not cover, let us know in the comments.  You can find the show notes available at williambeem.com/episode35 Tell us what you think, if you’ve tried these out.  And if you have got an opinion on Adobe Spark Post that’s different than ours and you’ve got a good reason why it’s useful, please let me know, because I’d love to find out how to make good use out of it.

Alright, again, we appreciate you. Thanks so much. You can find show notes at williambeem.com/episode35

You can find links to the show to subscribe on iTunes, Google Play Music and Stitcher Radio at photoflunky.com

Thank you so much.  We’ll talk to you again next week.

 


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