Phone camera is not something new. And as it has acquired higher quality nowadays, we rely more on them rather than DSLR sometimes due to their convenience. The phone initiates the popularity of selfie which is hard to be achieved by normal cameras. Then it brings out tons of selfie and retouch apps to help with a better portrait picture. I just went through most of the popular photo editing apps especially with beauty and retouch functions and here is my summary.

Most of the apps share this work flow:

Take a selfie / Upload from existing pictures > Retouch > Save & Share

According to the user task flow, I would like to break down one app into the following four parts: starting screen, camera, photo editing, save and share (Album). And I am here majorly talking about five related apps: Visage Lab, Perfect365, Camera360, BeautyCam, and YouCam Perfect.

Starting screen

Some starting screens come with several buttons allowing the user to choose whether they wanna take a picture through the camera or go directly to the album. And we can see that both Visage Lab and Perfect 365 have one most recent taken photo on the starting screen, which could provide a shortcut for the user.

Some change the words album into words such as photo edit or face beauty, but they actually have the same function as when tapping them, the user will go directly to the album to choose a photo and then edit it. However, the user probably will get confused about these buttons as they don’t show any hint related to albums from the wording.

There are also other buttons to be played around on the starting screen such as collage, tips or even the sharing community within the app. Those functions are relatively less common used and I would recommend to keep the number of buttons within four in one screen so that the user will not be overwhelmed when they start using the app. If the app truly has more than four buttons designed in the starting screen, the swiping function to hide less important buttons into the second screen is a smart choice. The following two are good examples.

As what is shown below, putting everything on one screen looks quite busy.

Camera

Camera of all those apps has the same function: shooting pictures. However, we can still find differences among them. Mostly, the work flow is quite easy, users tap camera button, and take a picture, and then they are allowed to abondom it to retake or use it. When they finally decide to use the photo, they will be led to the editing part.

However, the work flow is not exactly the same. In apps like BeautyCam and YouCam, users are required to save the photo first, and then tap the photo editing button for next step. The following is their camera workflow.

For some other apps, the flow could be simpler by directly leading the user to photo editing. That is being said, after tapping use the photo, there is no step to save the photo and then choose another function. One step has been saved in this way. As those apps are focused on selfie or portrait, they mostly have a face checking session after taking the photo, which may take 10–20 seconds to complete. It is not user-friendly during this session as users have nothing to do but wait, and none of the products have good solution regarding this issue so far. The following three apps are those who have less steps during camera section.

Another issue to note is that some apps have implemented the real time effects into camera such as BeautyCam, YouCam, and Camera 360, which means that users can view the filtered effects while taking photos. However, there are still some who just use pure camera and put all the editing afterwards, like Visage Lab and Camera 360. In my point of view, as most people love to share the photo directly after they take one, real time effects would be much more efficient for them.

Photo Editing and Save&Share

Editing should be the most fun part in these apps. And here, the editing is majorly about retouching face. I am not going to specifically talk about each retouch function, but more about how the experience like in different apps.

The following are the work flow for these five apps:

These two share a lot similarity with simple work flow and common UI for retouching — all retouching functions at the bottom and Back & Save buttons at the top. However, for BeautyCam, putting the back and forth button at the same row with the other two make it too busy and easy to make mistakes. YouCam does a better job in positioning these two. And as most people are right-handed, it probably makes more sense to put the Compare button to the right side. It is wise to put save and share together so that users can save steps for saving and go directly to share in BeautyCam. Yet, YouCam has not implemented the share function.

Camera 360 has slight difference in work flow compared to above two. After imported the photo, Share, Edit and Import to its own Album are in the same level with no time order. When tapping Edit, users do all the retouching things as the second screen shows; and when they tap Save, it goes back to the first screen rather than another screen for photo saving&sharing. This work flow is a little bit confusing for the first-time users, as most of us are supposed to edit the photo first before sharing, there is less sense to let Share and Edit button to be shown at the same time.

Visage Lab automatically apply all retouch functions to the photo at the first time without adjustment. And users are allowed to delete any of those as they like. It may be good for those who don’t want to spend a lot of time retouching their face, but still providing less freedom for users. And positioning the Save&Share button at top left beside the Back button is not quite delightful.

Perfect 365 acquires the most retouch functions so they choose the side navigation view to display (screen 2). The nav view could be seen as the first level, and what is shown at the buttom is second more even third level, which is more specific functions. However, switching between side navigation bar to tool bar at the bottom all the time is not that easy for users. I would recommend that all the them could be set at the buttom, being separated visually and through certain animation, like what Pixlr does. Converse to Visage Lab, Perfect 365 allows users to adjust the degree of every setting, which provides as much freedom as possible.

Summary

There are not many apps that specialize in selfie and retouch, and the above five are some popular and highly recommended ones online. Through the analysis, even though they share a lot of similar functions and even UI/UX, there are still several differences which we could learn from. With the popularity of photo sharing community, selfie & retouch will be even more popular and users will ask for much higher efficient and more personalized mobile app for editing, which will become one of the biggest challenge for this kind of apps in near future.