Making your on-the-go look kawaii as hell
By Brittney MacDonald, Life & Style Editor
Everyone wants that perfect selfie, especially now that the cold weather is encouraging everyone to bundle up in their trendiest knitwear. However, only the most basic smart phone users would ever post a picture to their Instagram pre-filter. So how do you make your snapshots stand out in a sea of Mayfair and Valencia? The trick is to know your apps! There are plenty of photo editing apps available for free on both iOS and Android—the trick is that quite a few of them aren’t really in English. Here are a couple that aren’t too complicated.
Deco Album by Prime Again
This app has some English instructions, so it’s relatively easy to get the hang of. Its strength is in the collage. It allows you to add multiple photos to a back drop of your choice, as well as decorate them with a pretty large selection of digital stickers. You can also resize the images and add text. It does not allow you to add frames, however, and its filters tend to reduce the quality of the photo.
Beauty Camera by Meitu
This app is perfect if you like a simple aesthetic, but want a lot of varying filters. It has some digital stickers, but not a lot. Its strength is the sheer size of the collection of filters available to you. It will also auto brighten your skin if your current phone camera doesn’t already do that. This app is great for the selfie lover that suffers from acne, because the adjustable beauty filters work great to mask the redness and scarring that you might want to hide. The downside is that it has no instructions whatsoever, not even ones in a language other than English—so most of learning how this app functions is a series of trial and error.
Deco Puri by Tacoty JP
Stickers are fun. Do you know what’s better than stickers? Having so many stickers that you could literally find one for any occasion! Needless to say, this app offers a huge selection of free digital stickers, frames, and pretty much whatever else you would need to decorate your photo to your heart’s content. It is wholly based on the purikura photo booths popular in Japan, Korea, and China, so in that vein, it grants you access to a large library of elements that will keep you busy for weeks. It also has a couple pre-selected sets based off of popular selections or events. So if you’re in a rush, but you really need to add something to your photo, because otherwise it would look boring next to the rest of your feed, this app has you covered!
