Best Alternative Camera Apps for Android - 2021 Review By TechZG

Here we have the best camera apps for android for this year, so these are alternative. Camera apps, the stock camera app on your android device will be perfectly great, but you can get some extra features. Some manual features and simply some better features in some of these apps. All these are free for most of the options that you can get. There are some paid versions which I'll go through, but let's get on to the first one, which is open camera. This is one of the most popular alternative camera apps for android.

One of the features I like is being able to essentially change the exposure separately from your focusing point. It's actually really easy to use. You can basically lock the exposure of your image and then very easily change your focus from the background to the foreground completely separately. Of course, you can do this in stock camera apps as well, but in this one it's really well laid out. This app is completely free, and actually it's an open source app.

Hence, the name open camera, which means two things. First, it's open source, so people are constantly going to be changing. It and updating it adding features. Of course, on the flip side, you may get a few more bugs, but in my usage of open camera I came across very few because it's open source there are no ads, which is a definite plus for this app. There are limitations in the app, though, for example, the zoom can only go into 10 times now.

A lot of modern camera phones, especially on the android system, do have longer zoom ranges. My phone, for example, going up to, I think 60 times. You can't use that in this app you can only go out to 10 times. So that's a definite limitation also with this app, because it's open source, not all the features in the app- can be used on every single android device, so it'll be different depending on what phone you have, but for the basics, that's pretty much there for everyone. You can choose the bit rate of video recording in this one as well, which is really cool.

So that means you can choose the quality of the video, the higher the bit rate, usually the higher quality. The interface 2 is kind of basic. Some other options in this list have a nicer or cleaner, more modern interface, but as a completely free and not ad supported camera app open camera is definitely worth a go and a lot of people use it footage camera is the next on the list. This will actually look really similar to the stock camera app in your phone, whether it's iOS or android. Obviously, a lot of them kinds of look similar these days in terms of the layout.

Well, this one does too, so you get controls down at the bottom, and you can flick through them to see the different options. So it's going to feel very familiar for everyone what's great about. This, though, is that the manual controls really are front and center, so you can change the exposure. The white balance, many other functions as well. All the manual controls really are built in to be used straight away, which is kind of different to a lot of these stock camera apps these days, I also like the way that the shutter speed and ISO are displayed right there on the screen.

For you to see that works for both the camera and also the video camera as well, you also get to switch from manual focus and exposure to auto very quickly. It's really intuitive layout. So it puts everything there you can switch between them. Very simply, it does have all the manual controls all there. Also, you get slow motion features.

You even get a raw feature as well, so you can shoot all of your images in raw, which is obviously a much higher quality and if you're taking photography seriously, then obviously that's something you're going to want. You can also choose the resolution of your images and also choose the quality of your photos, although it doesn't really give you any specifics about that quality. Are you can just change it from medium to high and have to hope that higher is good for you when it comes to video, though you can choose the nitrate of your recording, which is a really great feature? There are some limitations in the free portion of the app though, but for most people it's going to be enough. More worrying, though, is that I haven't found the ability to choose frame rates in the free version, which obviously isn't great, and if you are into video, then obviously you're going to want to change your frame rates, because if you shoot in 24 and this app is shooting in 30, then you might have some problems when it comes to editing later, also in the free version, you're limited to five-minute video recording. If you want to take that limit away, you have to go for the paid version.

Mixtec is next on. This is a really fun app. I included this one really because of all the creative controls that you can get in this app that really a lot of stock camera apps. Just don't have the way that you change. Everything on this app is by first pressing the screen like you're focusing and then all the other manual options come up.

So you can change the exposure white balance, ISO and everything else after you've touched the screen once you do also have the ability to choose raw image capture or raw plus JPEG, which is, I think, a really cool feature that you can get both the raw and the JPEG shot at once. You also have timers you can switch on or off HDR, depending on what you're doing, and you can choose the image quality from 80 to 100. Again, we don't really know what that means, because it's not relative to anything but hey you can choose if you want to take up more space and get a higher quality image. There's also a range of creative features in this app which pretty much none of the other ones have. So you can actually capture gives in this automatically so film something, and it will turn it right into a gift for you there's also something called planet which is kind of crazy.

It's kind of unique. I think it's quite fun, you're not going to use this all the time, of course, but just a fun feature for this app panorama, of course, and the creative feature which annoyingly puts the partaker logo at the bottom of the image. I guess you can easily change this just edit it out by editing the aspect ratio a little, it's kind of annoying that it does that for the creative feature, because you do get a ton of different controls, different colors and themes and everything for that annoyingly. The logo is there, but if you're, just in the normal camera mode, it will let you take those images with no logo. I really like the manual controls.

I think it's laid out. Well, it's quite a modern interface, quite intuitive, I would say better layout than open camera for sure you get a bunch of other features as well. Let me move on to manual camera and there's actually two versions of this app there's a light version. There's a pro version. Pro obviously has some more features and no limitations whatsoever, but the light version, I think for a lot of people is going to be enough.

So you have pretty much every manual control that you want right here. It is actually very intuitive, and it's laid out in a tiered system. So you just enter one of the controls. Then it gives you a bunch of other controls that you can change and edit, if you are in the free version, it's mostly the video features that are going to be limited. However, even in the free version, you get a lot of controls that you can change, and I really like the settings screen.

It's modern, and it's really easy to understand. You can choose the video frame rates and also the nitrate of the video as well, and that's not something you can do in every app and the image formats for this app are JPEG and PNG. You can choose from those if you want to record video for more than five minutes. Furthermore, you're going to have to go pro, and I think that's about five dollars. A really great feature of this app, though, is focus peaking, and this is something that actually a lot of cheaper cameras.

Don't have you usually have to go up to maybe a medium or a high-end camera to actually get focus peaking. You can get that in this app focus peaking just lets. You see visually. What is in focus in the frame by essentially coloring it in, so you can really easily lock in your focus, something I really don't like in this app, though, is after I took one of the images it popped up with an app that I had to get rid of before coming out of the app it's kind of annoying. But I guess it's ad supported and if you don't want those ads, you're just going to have to pay, and then we come to Guam or Guam port, so this is going to be very different, depending on which brand that you have which phone that you have but Guam ports is something that a lot of people use on their android phone.

So this isn't going to be for everyone, but a few people do it. Guam is the stock camera app from Google. They use this camera app on their pixel smartphones, which are almost universally praised for their amazing cameras. Now, of course, Google Pixel phones are great, but they don't have any unique hardware that can't be found in other android phones, but what they do have is amazing software and image processing, and a lot of that is coming in the Guam app. So a lot of people will take the Guam application and want to put it on their android device.

Now this isn't easy as just going to the app store and downloading the Guam app, because it's kind of not available, but the way that most people do. It is simply to go onto google and search for the Guam APK for their device. Some devices support it better than others. Unfortunately, you'll have to see about your android device, but basically you can go to google type in Guam APK. Then your device and see what comes up from there.

All you have to do is download the APK install it on your device. You get the Guam application on there, and then you can use it to take images, but when you do have the Guam app, you can use things like night sight which google is famed for, and this is all image processing the reason people download this is for the auto features, the image processing and just to get a kind of different look and feel for their images. Guam isn't always perfect, though, because Guam is made for pixel phones and not your device if it isn't a pixel, so some people get great results with this. Other phones are just going to get bang average results and that's just going to really come down to. I guess luck on what device that you have, but that is a bunch of really cool free, semi-free camera apps for android that maybe are a little different to the stock camera app.

That comes with your phone. I hope this one was helpful for you. If it was, please give the video a thumbs up subscribe for more, and I'll, see you in the next one.

Source : TechZG