Mike's NBC-TV stories

The latest apps for photographers

It’s now officially autumn and that means fall colors – and taking pictures of nature’s amazing red, orange, and yellow landscapes.

With just the right app, one need only spend a few bucks instead of a few hundred to get professional-looking landscape photos.

PhotoPills is made for landscapes with its ability to tell users the best times of the day to shoot based on location – perfect for if you want the brightest part of the day or warm glow of a setting sun. The app also offers a slew of other options, too, giving users the opportunity to do things like calculating exposures, depth of field, and more. The app is $9.99 for iOS.

Photogene is a full-featured photo editor. It’s perfect for fall colors because users can do so much with the app: crop, straighten, adjust color, sharpen, retouch and more. Users also can store photos easily to cloud-based storage like Dropbox or post to Facebook, Twitter, and more. And if users don’t want to mess with adjustments, just use one of the many presets. The app is $1.99 for iOS.

The Perfectly Clear app makes up for what a phone camera lacks by applying 18 so-called automatic corrections to photos. The developers of Perfectly Clear say it’s like having a top-level digital camera in your pocket all the time, making it perfect for an unexpected display of fall colors in just the right sunlight. It has features such as panorama, and the ability to brighten up photos. The app is $2.99 for Android.

Mike is a veteran journalist whose video "PC Mike" reports have been distributed weekly to all 215 NBC-TV stations since 1994, making him one of the most experienced tech reporters in the country. His tech stories and videos have appeared on MSNBC, CNBC, the Today Show, The New York Times, USA Today and in numerous national newspapers and magazines. In addition to the PC Mike tech blog, he also publishes the Roadtreking.com RV Travel Blog in which he travels North America in an RV reporting about interesting people and places.