Enlight

As a hobby photographer I often think about the possibility to do all editing and organization of my pictures on my iDevices. To be able to live without the MacBook and just have my iPad and iPhone. For me there is still not the right apps and power in those iDevices to make the switch completely. I am still dependent on Lightroom and Photoshop and their versions on OSX. There I can also use my beloved plugins from (previously) Nik Software (now owned by Google).

When it comes to organizing pictures I still haven’t come close to find anything. My picture library is kind of a mess. But when it comes to editing I think technology will soon be there. I know there is Lightroom for IOS. But that version is still far from the desktop version in my opinion. With the new powerful iPad Pro, I think it will not be long until we get an almost similar version of Lightroom on iOS as we have on OSX. The current Lightroom for iOS is for me a bit awkward to do my editing in. I feel a bit out of control when using it.

One app that I’ve been using for a long time now, and that I think takes a big step forward in editing photos on iOS, is Enlight from Lighttricks Ltd I find it easy to use, it has a clear workflow if you want to follow it, and some good editing tools. It is available for both iPhone and iPad.

Enlight’s sidebar: collapsed to the left, and expanded image category to the right

It has a sidebar on the right with 8 editing categories. The order of the categories could be seen as a good workflow to follow. The first – Canvas – is all about cropping, rotating, skewing the picture. A good place to start if any of those operations is needed. It continues with the Image category where you can do editing like brightness, contrast, sharpness, shadows and highlights etc. You can start with one of the many presets provided, where you also can set the intensity of the preset. Pressing to tools button in the bottom of the screen reveals a number of tools to do a more detailed editing of the picture.

In the beginning I had a hard time finding the different tools, like brightness, sharpness and so on. But after a while I realized they are quite logically placed.

Of course you don’t have to use each category in the workflow when editing your picture. But I found myself often using the Image section’s adjust and clarity tools. Sometimes it’s enough to just use one of the presets for those tools. Other times I adjust the intensity of them or use more detailed editing by pressing the tools button. It gives me good options whether I need to just to some light editing or if I need to do some more heavy editing. Enlight’s interface makes it easy to work with the pictures in my opinion, and it feels like I am in control of what I am doing unlike many other apps I’ve tried.

Examples of Enlight’s presets to the left. To the right some of the tools revealed after pressing the tools button.

One feature that I haven’t tried so much yet is the possibility to save you editing session and come back later to finish it. It can be found in the top toolbar of the app if pressing the share icon. The Share Toolbar also lets you share multiple photos at once.

The app has a built-in tour to get started quickly. And recently they also added a couple of tutorials for doing for example “Dramatic Portrait” and “Double Exposure”.

Enlight has a lot of tools in the app. More than I will cover in this post. But what I found is that, besides being easy to use and with a number of powerful tools, the editing gives a good quality and doesn’t “destroy” the image. Besides some very basic editing in iOS’s built in Picture App, this is the app I keep coming back to to do my editing. I’ve been using it for some time now, and it is one of my favorite apps of 2015

Get it from the App Store here:
Enlight av Lightricks Ltd.

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