5 Fun Apps To Mash Up Your Photos

Do you still carry a smartphone and a camera? Chances are you use your phone for most of your snaps. Smartphones all now have reasonable cameras, and unless you're an analogue enthusiast, the days of carrying a film camera will be well behind you.

Smartphone apps allow us to digitally process our best pictures, effectively bringing the darkroom to the palm of your hand. You can play around with your photos the second you take them. Instagram, with its simple range of filters, is probably the best known photo editing app out there. However, some apps have gone much further and created weird filters and tools to really mess up your photos and create weird mashups of different effects. What's more, you don't need creative training to use them.

Here are 5 examples of the best mashup tools to unleash your creativity.

1. GoldfrApp

Does the name sound familiar? GoldfrApp is is a simple and fun photo app made by the musical duo of the same name. The app allows you to select two photos in your camera roll and combine them to create a double negative image.
There are a couple of additional features to allow you to mash up the image after it has been combined, and there is also a fun shake the phone feature to randomly combine images in your camera roll. It's too random for some creative professionals, but ideal for the enthusiastic amateur.

2. Photochop

Photochop is a great little tool to really mess up your images. You can split an image into tiles and nudge or rotate different pieces. There is also a warp feature to mess up different sections of your photo.
This app allows you to use subtle features to distort your images in weird, wonderful and sometimes scary ways.

3. Lego Photo

Lego Photo takes any image and transforms it to make it look like it was made out of Lego bricks, using an in-built camera and a range of colour options. Tap the screen and the colours ripple and change. Whilst the novelty wears off, it’s a free fun app which you can come back to at any time. It works best with high contrast, so get creative.

4. Face Swap

Face Swap does exactly what its name suggests. Take a photo of two people side by side and swap their faces to create weird new people that look scarily familiar. It's a great way to mash up two images in an instant.
Again, Face Swap is a fun novelty tool, but perhaps not an app you'd use in a professional creative job. But you never know when you want to create a new face to inspire a story or painting, so have a play around.

5. Comic Book!

Everyone's dream creative job is to draw comics for a living, and Comic Book! is a great photo editing tool that can help you do just that. It turns your photos into a comic book style drawing that you can customise.
With Comic Book!, you can lay out several photos in different boxes and add captions, borders, stickers and other items to the images. The results can be saved or exported to other services and sites.

Get Creative!

Whilst these apps are unlikely to ever create a masterpiece, you can use them in random and creative ways to help inspire your creative work or have fun with friends. What’s more, most of them allow you to save the photo back to your camera roll, so you can potentially use several different apps to create one unique image. Why not Lego your face, blend it back into the original image with the double negative, swap it with another person, chop it up and put it in a comic book? With your smartphone at your side, the power of the photo mash up is yours to exploit.

Featured images:

•  Photo provided by: smartphotostock.com

Author Bio:
By Sam Wright
Sam Wright is working with Brand Republic and is constantly attached to his smartphone.