New to Android or have you bought an all new shiny Android device and want to explore your creative talent on it? Be it writing, music/video/image editing or drawing, here are the best available apps on Android for your creative urge.
Before diving in the world of creative apps, let us have a look at these 2 devices which are good for pen input.
Samsung Galaxy Note 3 (price in India): INR 45,300.
Micromax Canvas Doodle 2 (price in India): INR 16,365
Drawing & Marking Apps
Adobe Photoshop Touch – All of you might already know how famous Adobe Photoshop is. Now you can use it on your Android smartphone or tablet as well. There are separate smartphone and tablet optimised versions for Adobe Photoshop Touch app. You can replicate all the core features like merging images, using multiple layers, apply professional effects and filters. Added features are, you can share those creations with your friends on social networking websites.
Infinite Painter – It is one of the best sketching app for Android, and is optimised for phones like Samsung Galaxy Note with pressure sensitive capacitive stylus as well as phone like Canvas Doodle 2 with normal capacitive stylus. It has options for selecting over 100 types of brushes and ability to performing colour mixing and blending. Apart from normal features like multiples layers and project-playback, it has some special modes which lets you do things such as creating 5 types of symmetries and using reference images for drawing over them.
Paperless – It is like an Android version of the popular drawing app ‘Paper’ for Apple iPad. What you get is basic drawing experience with 6 drawing tools, colour mixing and dynamic smoothing and multitouch gestures. You also get complete control over size, opacity, smoothing and thickness.
Skitch – This is a very easy to use application from Evernote which lets you markup and draw over images and PDFs with some cool markers, icons and arrows. Any file you edit automatically syncs to your Evernote account.
Photography & Image Editing Apps
Snapseed – It is the best image editing app for Android. It is also available on iOS and Mac OS X. It has very easy to use controls to edit the image. It has features from the very basic ones such as cropping, rotating and effects to very high end ones like lighting, selective adjust for brightness, contrast, saturation, white balance and ambiance. It comes with in-built effects like grunge, tilt-shift, retroflex, drama and vintage. Users can compare original and edited images with an easy long press gesture.
Instagram – A social network where users can shoot images or videos and apply instant pre-configured filters/effects in square format. Users can apply HDR effect as well as tilt-shift/blur option in a very intuitive manner. Editing images and videos can either be shared on Instagram with tags or save them locally without sharing.
PicFrame – A great app for making cool collages using various images. There are tens of different frames which can be used as needed. The frame colour, width, corners and image scaling can be set as needed.
Camera JB+ – If you are unhappy with the in-built camera app in your phone, this the app to get. It has various options like using volume rocker as camera shutter key and live photo effects. There is countdown timer, burst mode and picture quality setting.
Music Making Apps
EDJing Turntable – Winner of LES Apps 2013, this is, hands down the best DJ app available on Android. Apart from regular DJ app features like cueing, TK filter, cross fader, flanger, loop and echo, it has interesting new feature such as Deezer and SoundCloud integration as well as ‘Automix’ mode.
Writing Apps
Draft – A text editor with smartphone and tablet optimised UI which lets you create regular text files or markdown/multimarkdown text files. It saves those files in Dropbox. There is a full screen mode for distraction free writing as well.
LightPaper Pro – LightPaper has all the features like MarkDown support and Dropbox integration provided by Draft but also some advanced features like WordPress blogging support and fast edit keys.
Video & Video Editing Apps
WeVideo – An easy to use application which helps you in easy image/video capturing and edit them using tools like trimmer and splitting. Users can stylise their videos using inbuilt themes, transitions, titles and video effects. Final video files can be exported locally or directly to YouTube or Facebook.
CinemaGram – This app lets you create GIFs from videos in such a way that only the selected area of video animates while the other part remains stationary. Users can also apply pre-configured effects and filters to the video.
About the Author:
Ashwin works with Mysmartprice.com which is a price comparison website that helps users find the best price of mobiles, books, camera and lots more. Ashwin is a graduate of State University New York with an MS in Information Systems and an MBA from Amrita School of Business Bangalore. He writes on smartphones, gadgets, technology , ecommerce and marketing.
Image Credit: Aberty Dunn
