Recommended iPhone Photo Editing Apps I use (2025)
One of the most frequent questions about my iPhone photos is about the iPhone photo editing apps I used to edit them. The answer to this question is quite personal. The best iPhone photo editing apps are the ones that support your editing style and requirements.
In this blog post, you’ll see my personal list of the best iPhone photo editing apps I use regularly and a few alternatives I tested. I've been using almost all of these apps since they were released. Please understand this list as an inspirational starting point to find the best iPhone photo editing app for your need.
- My Requirements for iPhone Photo Editing Apps
- My Recommended Photo Editing Apps for iPhone and iPad
- Summary
My Requirements for iPhone Photo Editing Apps
As a travel photographer, I mainly take photos of landscapes, cityscapes and lost places. So I need photo editing apps on my iPhone and iPad that help me with the following photo editing tasks:
- Applying selective adjustments to parts of a photo, like the sky
- Editing RAW photos
- Remove objects from photos
- Fix perspective distortions that occur when I photograph buildings
- Ability to denoise photos to a certain degree
As a minimalist, I strive to use as few photo editing apps as possible. You’ll find these apps in the following list.
My Recommended Photo Editing Apps for iPhone and iPad
The following list of recommended photo editing apps comes from several years of experience using the app. For your convenience, I’ve also added some of the apps I tried as an alternative.
Photomator is one of the Best Affordable Photo Editing Apps
I’ve switched to Photomator after Adobe announced their price increases in 2025. While a Lightroom subscription costs you 143.88 USD a year, Photomator is available for 39.99 USD per year or for 119.00 USD as a one-time purchase.
Photomator is one of the best photo editing apps on iPhone and iPad
I’ve switched to Photomator after Adobe announced their price increases in 2025. While a Lightroom subscription costs you 143.88 USD a year, Photomator is available for 39.99 USD per year or for 119.00 USD as a one-time purchase.
Featurewise, Photomator has almost all the features I need for editing my travel photos on the go, like:
- Selective masks for applying selective adjustments
- Supports classic RAW and Adobe ProRAW
- Manual and machine-learning based denoise
- Almost all adjustments I need compared to Lightroom Mobile.
I also liked the excellent integration into the iOS and iPadOS ecosystem, and it’s clean and easy to use user interface.
Compared to Lightroom Mobile, I miss the following features in Photomator. But I can use two other apps mentioned in this blog post to overcome that limitation. These missing features are:
- AI-based object removal. But I can use TouchRetouch for that.
- Perspective correction is available in Photomator, but limited. But I can use SKRWT app instead. See below for more details.
Overall, Photomator is my best choice for a photo editing app to edit my travel photos on iPhone and iPad on the go. To learn more about its features, head to my Photomator Review.
Touch Retouch is the Best App for Removing Objects from Photos
TouchRetouch on iPad and iPhone
Touch Retouch is the best iphone photo editing app for retouching photos. You can remove blemishes, people and even fences and even entire structures. In 2024 the developers added an AI feature that will automatically find and select people in your photos. That’s a great helper to remove dozens of people from your photos.
Given how many great iPhone photo editing apps were abandoned by their developers, I appreciate the developers of Touch Retouch for updating their app regularly. Thanks!
Touch Retouch is one of the best photo editing apps I mentioned in the introduction for one simple reason: It does one thing and does it extremely well.
Touch Retouch works on iPhones and iPads. On iPad, it even supports the Apple Pencil. Of course, I have an extensive Touch Retouch review for you in the blog.
Alternatives for Touch Retouch
Finding an alternative for the Touch Retouch photo editing app for iPhone is difficult. I haven’t found one so far. There is a retouching feature in Lightroom Mobile, that uses AI and works okayish. But I’ve been using Touch Retouch for so long that using my HI (human intelligence) using this app produces far better results.
Another app that I use increasingly for retouching photos is Adobe Photoshop on iPad.
SKRWT App is the best App to Fix Perspective Distortions
SKRWT app is another recommended photo editing app that does just one thing but does it very well. It allows you to fix perspective distortions on iPhone and iPad.
Screenshot SKRWT on iPad and iPhone showing 4PNTS and SKRWT modules
SKRWT app offers three modules:
- The SKRWT module to fix horizontal, vertical, and barrel distortion
- The 4PNTs module for freehand correction of perspective distortions
- The MRRW module for creating symmetric mirror effects
SKRWT app was the first photo editing app of its kind that didn't reduce the overall resolution of a photo when fixing perspective distortions. Many other apps did and still will reduce the overall photo resolution when correcting perspective distortions.
In January 2022, the developers released version 1.5 to lay the foundation for future updates and to fix a few annoyances with recent iOS versions. I've been looking forward to this release that I could test during the development phase, and I've published an extensive review of the SKRWT photo editing app, which works on iPhone and iPad.
Alternative for SKRWT App
If you only need to fix slight perspective distortions, you may want to try the native iOS photos app. It allows you to fix horizontal and vertical perspective distortions without loss of image resolution. Of course, you’ll also find a perspective correction feature in Lightroom Mobile that works quite well.
Summary
This is a personal list of the best iPhone photo editing apps I use for my kind of photography: Travel photography. These photo editing apps may be suitable for you if you do the same kind of photography.
If you’d ask me to recommend just a single photo editing app for iPhone, then it would be Lightroom Mobile. But if you do not need all the fancy features like selective adjustments, you may want to give a photo editing app a try that you already own: Apple’s photos app (which I rarely use).
If you’re still looking for your perfect iPhone camera app, you may want to check my list of the best iPhone camera apps I rely on. I also have a similar list for the best iPhone photo accessories I use during my trips.
