Mike's NBC-TV stories

Three very powerful photo editing apps

Photo apps just seem to keep getting better and better, giving us the ability to turn pictures taken with our smartphones into professional-looking shots.

They’ve been around awhile, but this week I’m talking about three of hottest today.

Micosoft Pix is a recently released free photo app available for iOS. It allows for all of the features you would expect, such as editing tools, filters, gallery view, and sharing. The key difference is the ability of Microsoft Pix to enhance photos on the fly, to stabilize or make changes based on the subject of your photo, such as human faces.

Facetune bills itself as the way to “perfect every photo or selfie” and is designed for photos of faces. It widens smiles, brightens teeth, changes hair color – even emphasizes eyes. The app is easy to use and powerful. It costss $3.99 in the App Store and there is a version for Android. The Windows version of Facetune is $2.99.

Enlight is the last photo app you’ll ever need to download, according to the developers. This app offers precision light and color adjustments that are as easy as dragging a finger across the screen. Enlight also includes numerous filters, and even the ability to make photos look like sketches. It’s $3.99 for iOS.

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.