Five fabulous photo editing apps that will make you stand out on Instagram, carefully curated by yours truly at Powered Labs.

Thanks to vast improvements in mobile technology, you no longer need a laptop or Photoshop suite to create stunning, professional-looking images. Whether you’re a travel enthusiast, love taking family photos, or are a photojournalist, here are some great (and mostly free!) photo editing apps that will turn any smart phone into your very own editing studio.

1 Afterlight

This app is a personal favorite and it only sets you back by 99 cents. It offers a variety of editing tools to help brighten, crop, rotate, and apply more than a dozen artistic filters to your snapshots. It also offers in-app purchases for those who want to access alternate frames such as the classic instant Polaroid look. Not only that, you can apply templates of objects and letters over your image to give it an uber hipster look.     2 InstaCollage One of the most fun photo apps to play with. On the individual photo editing level, it’s pretty basic – all you can do is change the size, and apply filters to the images themselves. The real beauty is that you can arrange multiple photos into a collage series with dozens of different arrangements. Whether you want to make an artsy triptych of mother nature, or a colorful Christmas family collage of everyone getting drunk at the holiday party, InstaCollage is a fun means to that end.   3 StackMotion For only $1.99 this is a photo app that makes pictures a little more dynamic. Essentially working like a green screen, StackMotion lets you superimpose your photo onto another background, and you can edit even further by adding video, text and even music!

 

4 Sktchy

Enter the world of the Sktchy community, and you’ll be able to find and share pictures of others – and make portraits of them! This is a super fun photo editing app that makes you feel like a true artist. And who doesn’t like a cartoon rendering of themselves?     5 Retromatic Developed by Peta Vision, this app takes your modern day pictures and turns them into a great retro portrait! It doesn’t have tons of features beyond this, but it’s the ease of use that really makes this stand-out app. Download it for only $1.99 and start creating unique, stylized vintage shots with your existing pictures!