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The Afterlight app, formerly known as Afterglow, is an image editing iOS app. The app has been designed for those who love taking photos with their iPhone and then spending ages fiddling with effects, image quality and detail levels to get the best out of them.

There are literally hundreds of photo editing apps on iTunes, so what makes this one so special?

First of all, Afterlight can control your camera. While this part of the app needs improvement as it’s no better than the standard iOS app, it’s a neat touch. With development it could add real potential. And secondly, it’s very simple to use at a basic level. While getting the best out of Afterlight will take lots of time and fiddling, you can be up and running in a minute or so. The controls are familiar, the options plentiful and the ease of use is a strong selling point.

Once you buy and install Afterlight you will see two buttons: the camera app and the editing app. The camera takes you into the interface for shooting and this is where the app needs work. There is no HDR, no panorama and no burst mode yet, but other than that is the same as that of iOS.

The editing app opens quickly and can either edit shots taken with the app, or those already on the phone. You can adjust things like brightness, contrast, exposure and colour saturation, which sets it above Instagram right away.

There are six editing buttons at the bottom of the screen. From here you can undo an action, make adjustments, use filters and textures, then crop and rotate and finally add a frame. Afterlight currently has 56 filters that mainly concentrate on providing vintage film effects such as glare and light leak.

Afterlight is one of those apps that is easy to get into but harder to master. Overall, we think this app is pretty good for the money and should offer hours of fun for iPhone snappers.

Jesmond Darmanin is a technology enthusiast who has his own blog at www.itnewsblog.com.