These days, you can hardly step outside without seeing somebody snapping a selfie. In a world full of selfies, make yours stand out by using a selfie app. These apps are loaded with tools that enhance your natural beauty and bring out your best features.
Want to master the art of the selfie? Below, we’ve listed our favorite selfie apps to help you snap an Instagram-worthy selfie that highlights your natural features without going overboard.
Further reading
Facetune2
Facetune2 is the ultimate selfie app. It ensures that regardless of what you consider to be your facial flaws, you can use the app to correct them and your parents will still recognize you. Specific retouching tools let you fix problem skin, whiten teeth, slim down or fatten up your face, brighten eyes, tame eyebrows, or go glamorous with full makeup and glitter brushes. The app offers advanced tools for altering the light source, removing shadows and glare, and controlling color temperature and saturation. A comparison tool lets you view before and after each step. Facetune2 is constantly updated, adding new features and streamlining the interface. Newer features include a revamped makeup palette with rainbow colors, multi-color neon filters, Light FX, and light leak effects. A Magic camera lets you tweak features and add makeup as you shoot with live filters to enhance your look.
Retrica
Retrica is a social network as well as a selfie photo and video app that gets you into the Instagram groove with tons of filters and stylized looks. You can preview over 150 gorgeous filters before you take your shot — but it doesn’t stop there. Retrica supports selfie collages with a variety of shots from different angles, and live videos or GIFs. Annotate your images with doodles, time stamps, messages, and a huge variety of stickers. The app encourages you to connect with and follow fellow selfie fanatics via the app’s chronological feed. You can also share your photos on Facebook and other social networks, or send images via private message.
AirBrush
AirBrush offers an easy, flexible take on the selfie genre, and if you’re obsessed with creating the perfect portrait, this app gives you plenty of options. You can extinguish most obvious skin tone, blemishes, and other facial flaws with a tap, but the real fun lies with tweaking each individual feature to enlarge your eyes, slim your face, narrow your nose, and then go completely Hollywood with a slate of nicely done makeup looks to suit every occasion. If you hate applying makeup directly to your mug, you can still get the full treatment with AirBrush. Newer features include Premium presets like Smooth 2.0 to smooth out skin imperfections.
Cymera
If you’re looking for a selfie cam with an indie attitude, have a peek at Cymera. Cymera not only fixes your face, it lets you style your presentation. First, you can perfect your look with 130 filters and special effects with an emphasis on skin smoothing, in addition to hundreds of hair and makeup items. Body shapers can trim your waist or reshape your legs. But what’s really intriguing about this app is its collection of seven camera lenses — divided lenses, fisheye, Lomo, and others. A silent mode lets you shoot on the sly. When you’re done, you can resort to styling your composition with a variety of stickers, art effects, built-in collage grids, or blurred backgrounds.
Selfie City
Do cities have identities? Does your personality reflect a particular city? SelfieCity uses this trope as a metaphor for self-reflection in addition to several other features that distinguish it from ordinary selfie apps. Each city — Formosa, Tokyo, Paris, Hong Kong, New York — offers a set of filters that broadly reflect its character or neighborhoods. Then, there’s the Double Exposure, Selfie Collage (combine up to 16 portraits), blurring and vignetting, live AR effects, and a function that mimics Apple live photos. The app’s intelligent beautification feature uses face recognition to enhance skin tone and texture. Many of the results are highly conceptual and artistic. It may or may not be your cuppa, but the concepts are intriguing and worth a look.
A Color Story
It’s not just another pretty interface chock full of filters. A Color Story rocks some serious editing tools for both photos and videos that help you improve your portraits even before you start to tackle faces. With over 300 filters designed by photo pros, 100 effects, and a boatload of advanced photo tools, your selfie is in good, colorful hands. A Color Story takes a different approach to filters in that it enhances colors already present in your composition to create an engaging scene. The app uses light leaks, flares, color fogs, and blend modes to give your selfie that artistic flair. Look out for Instagram grid preview and planning features and even batch editing. Newer features include advanced adjustments to all your favorite filters, allowing you to adjust each filter’s warmth, saturation, and brightness.
YouCam Perfect
When you want — no, need — perfection, YouCam Perfect is there for you. The app lets you shoot both still and video selfies while an auto-beautify feature enhances your looks as you shoot. The app masks skin flaws, while an eye enhancer enlarges eyes and removes under-eye puffiness. With group selfies, the app’s multi-face detection can enhance the look of each face in your shot. YouCam Perfect further improves selfies with elements like stickers, backgrounds, collages, and frames, and can remove distracting background objects. With full-body portraits, the app works to lengthen legs and slim bodies or make you taller or shorter. Newer features include a mirror tool, new animated effects like rainbow lights, improved auto-detect (giving you sharper cut-outs for your portraits), and a range of new beautify presets and animated stickers and effects for premium members.
Perfect365
For when you absolutely gotta look drop-dead gorgeous for your portrait, you can rely on Perfect365. This virtual makeup app sports 20 makeup and beauty tools, and over 200 presets and looks. A pro color palette lets you experiment with different color combinations. Perfect365 offers built-in beauty advice, complete with video tutorials, makeup tips, subtle feature enhancement, or full-on glamor. The app’s face detection promotes a natural look with accurate makeup placement. What separates Perfect365 from similar apps isn’t just the toolset, but its native ability to adjust the intensity of each effect using a slider. Further, it’s lined with a melange of celebrity-inspired templates aimed at beautifying your selfie, regardless if you’re set on trying a new pair of lashes or adjusting your skin tone.
Snapchat
While Snapchat lets you take any kind of photo or video you want, most people want it for the selfies. After snapping a photo you can add text overlays, World Lenses, and Bitmoji, send it to friends and family, and make the evidence disappear by having your creation self-destruct at a set interval. That ensures no one else besides the intended recipient gets to see your crazy cat whiskers and dog ears. As a selfie app that offers a bit of discretion and self-destructing options, Snapchat works excellently. You can also shoot a selfie in Snapchat and save it to your camera roll to post to Instagram or Facebook. Choose Save to Memories and Camera Roll to automatically save to your photos.
Camera360
With Camera360, you can be in it just for the lulz. Experiment with augmented reality, animal face stickers, animated frames, themes and costumes, and sound effects for photos and videos that make your photo reflect more of your inner self than you ever dared share. But seriously, the app also includes traditional imaging tools like crop, sharpness, and temperature as well as beautification tools that can apply makeup, hide blemishes, enlarge eyes, plump lips, slim noses and cheeks, and whiten teeth. Choose from a variety of special effects like light leaks and color casts, or paint artistic effects directly on your mug. The app also features over 100 classic photo filters and live filters, including Magic Skin/Sky/Color, Mirror, Double Exposure, Film, HDR, and many more. Newer features include a one-tap remover pen to eliminate blemishes for perfect glass skin.
Camera+ 2 ($5)
Camera+ has earned a spot as one of the most beloved photo apps for iOS. The revamped version two offers so much more opportunity to improve any photo you shoot, including, of course, selfies. The new design gathers related items into three distinct categories: Presets, shutter modes, and settings. The update introduces new features, like a larger selection of exposure controls and more advanced settings. You can use a continuous flash, zoom up to six times, and take pictures with the timer function thanks to the update. Just like the photo pros, you can adjust shutter speed, ISO, and white balance via on-screen wheels and controls. The app comes with features like portrait and depth capture, raw capture, slow shutter, and more. You can also switch between different shooting modes and explore the macro mode. This flexibility and range of settings will produce the best and most natural selfie of all.
Selfie Editor
This app is the one-stop-shop for immediate selfie improvement. The interface is very colorful and intuitive. All you have to do is snap a selfie, and you can start improving it immediately in the app. Auto mode offers slider-based adjustments to skin tone, brightness, smoothness, lip width and height, eye sharpness, and teeth whitening. You can accept or skip a host of other enhancements like eye, nose, and jaw size, or apply a series of stylistic filters.
PIP Camera
PIP Camera is kind of a hoot, as it livens up your selfies with a collection of artistic 3D frames that showcase the character of your face and personality. Your portrait gets filtered through common objects like bubbles, camera lenses, bottles, glasses, hearts, and other elements that most people would not associate with selfies per se. Adding these different props to your selfies is fun and makes for some unique photos. The app comes with different filters you can use to customize your foreground and background. If you can’t decide which selfie to post, the app has a collage mode you can use to combine different selfies.
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