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
- The best photo editing apps for iPhone and iPad
- Bonus iPhone Photo Editing Apps to Check Out
- 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:
Remove objects from photos
Fix perspective distortions that occur when I photograph buildings
Applying selective adjustments to parts of a photo, like the sky
Editing RAW photos
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.
The best 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.
The best iPhone photo editing app is Lightroom Mobile
Adobe Lightroom Mobile is my main photo editing app for iPhone and iPad for one simple reason. It offers is the most complete package of editing features.
Adobe Lightroom Mobile on iPhone and iPad
Let’s see, how good Lightroom Mobile fulfills my five photo editing requirements:
- I can remove simple objects from photos. As of 2024, Adobe added an AI-based feature for removing objects, which works okayish.
- I can fix all kinds of perspective distortions.
- It supports selective adjustments. I can brush over a part of an image either manually or with AI support and apply selective adjustments.
- Lightroom Mobile can open and edit classic RAW and Apple ProRAW photos.
- Lightroom Mobile allows very fine granular settings to denoise photos.
In addition to the above five key features I need, Adobe Lightroom offers some fascinating additional features I use occasionally.
- It allows you to blur the background of a photo, simulating depth of field using AI
- Color grading for shadows, mid-tones, and highlights
- Applying and creating presets
Sure, you'll need to purchase a subscription to use all the features of Lightroom Mobile. In my Lightroom Mobile Premium review I’ve outlined what's included in a subscription and why a subscription is worth the money.
In my opinion, Lightroom Mobile is one of the best iPhone photo editing apps if you’re looking for a complete set of editing features. But beware: Lightroom Mobile is not a photo editing app for filter enthusiasts - though you can create your own filters (aka presets) in Lightroom.
Alternatives for Lightroom Mobile
It’s difficult to provide an alternative for Lightroom mobile that offers the same feature set and that is either free or available for a one-time payment.
However, if you don’t need all the fancy features of Lightroom, you may want to consider looking at Photomator. I’ve posted a review of Photomator in my blog. Photomator is centered around filters with some editing features. One feature I really miss in Photomator is the ability to apply selective adjustments.
Another interesting alternative may be Adobe Photoshop Express which I reviewed in my blog. It offers many features similar to Lightroom, like masking and applying selective adjustments, but in a slightly stripped down version. Still, these features may still be interesting and valuable for you.
The third alternative for Lightroom Mobile is Darkroom. It offers many features you’ll also find in Lightroom Mobile. However, Darkroom also requires a subscription.
The best photo editing app for removing objects from photos is Touch Retouch
Touch Retouch is another evergreen and recommended photo editing app I’ve been using for years. It survived many spring cleanings on my iPhone, and I've used it since it was released in 2011.
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.
The best iPhone photo editing software to fix perspective distortions is SKRWT App.
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.
Adobe Photoshop Express is the best photo editing apps for quick edits
I began using Adobe Photoshop Express more and more in 2022, mainly for editing snapshots. So it’s about time to move the app to my list of the best iPhone photo editing apps in 2025.
I have no idea why Adobe calls this app Photoshop Express. Personally, I'd call it Lightroom Express. But independently of how I'd call this app, Photoshop Express offers several modules:
- A photo editor to manually adjust basic settings like lights, shadows, or colors or to apply predefined looks. You may know these looks like presets from Lightroom: a bunch of adjustments you can use with one click and then adjust them individually.
- A face retouching module for beauty retouching. With this AI-driven module, you can make people smile or add makeup.
- A photo combination module to combine two photos (a foreground and a background image) into a single photo
- A collage module to create photo collages.
From these features, I want to highlight the AI-driven masking feature that I can use to quickly select either the fore- or background and apply adjustments to the selection.
This feature may sound similar to the one in Lightroom mobile. However, the masking feature in Lightroom mobile is more sophisticated, allowing you to add or remove multiple parts of a mask. You can't do that in Photoshop Express
Moreover, you can use many editing features like the photo editing module of Adobe Photoshop Express right in the Photos App: It supports in-place editing for photos that are below 20 megapixels.
You'll need a premium subscription to use all Adobe Photoshop Express features. If you subscribe to one of the Adobe photography plans, you'll get a premium subscription of Photoshop Express as a bonus in addition to Adobe Lightroom Mobile Premium and/or Adobe Photoshop Premium (depending on the subscription).
To learn more, head to my Adobe Photoshop Express review. It works on iPhone and iPad.
Bonus iPhone Photo Editing Apps to Check Out
I use the app in this category occasionally. But who knows, someday one of the apps listed here may replace an app from the category above.
Photoshop for iPad is excellent for sophisticated photo editing on iPad
After its release in 2019, Photoshop for iPad received a lot of negative press; feature-wise, it's still not even close to Photoshop on a computer.
But Adobe has added frequently requested features since then, and I've been using Photoshop for iPad more and more. Finally, In 2023, it made it to the list of recommended photo editing apps I use regularly.
Don't get me wrong: Photoshop for iPad is not even close to feature parity with Photoshop on the desktop. But as of 2025, it has almost all the features I need for editing photos on iPad:
- Great integration with Lightroom mobile on iPad: Send a photo to Photoshop on iPad, edit it, and send it back to Lightroom
- Generative AI using Adobe Firefly, like generative extend and generative fill to remove or add objects to a photo
- AI-driven background removal
- Gaussian blur (e.g., to simulate depth of field), liquifying objects, content-aware fill to remove objects from a photo, and much more.
To use all features of Photoshop on iPad, you'll need a paid subscription to a photography plan which includes Adobe Lightroom mobile premium and Adobe Photoshop Express premium.
If you're wondering if Photoshop for iPad could replace tools like TouchRetouch and SKRWT app: if you're editing solely on iPad, then the answer is probably yes. But as I still edit my photos mainly on iPhone, I use Photoshop on iPad occasionally for more sophisticated edits. And I see no reason to change that anytime soon.
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.
