FX Photo Studio
Publisher: MacPhun LLC
Price: now on sale, $0.99

If you prefer more extreme manipulations to your photos, check out FX Photo Studio. In addition to letting you crop and rotate images, and adjust brightness, it comes with some 125 different effects. You can make it look like the picture was taken through water or snow, in a lightning storm, or through a fun house mirror. You can surround your image with butterflies, cupids, or hearts.

It took a few swipes to give this sailor suit the rainbow treatment

You can do all sorts of color transformations on your image, or make it look like it was taken with old film, or with a vignetting lens. Or make it look like it was so cold the lens got frosted. Or so rainy, your image is wet. You can even overlay fire, scary faces, a skull and a ghost, all of which are great if you're angry at someone. Post the finished images to Facebook or Twitter, or e-mail the photos right from the app.

Photographers debate each other over whether they should call the gadgets and apps they use to help them make images "tools" or "toys." FX Photo Studio can be used as a tool, but it can also be used as a toy, depending on your creative preference. If you like putting wacky things into your photos, you'll be happy with this. But if you're more conservative about photography, you probably won't find a use for most of the effects.

ColorSplash
Publisher: Pocket Pixels Inc.
Price: $1.99

If you've ever exclaimed, "Gosh, I wish there were a way to easily make most of my photo appear in grayscale, while coloring the part I want people to see the most," you'll be happy to know that yes, there's indeed an app for that. ColorSplash converts any image to grayscale, and lets you use your finger as a brush to paint the color back in. Choose from opaque or transparent brushes with soft or hard edges, and paint away. If you mess up, you can always undo, or just switch to painting with gray.

Why yes, I do like my pizza with clams. By coloring only the pizza, you may not notice that the plate is on a hotel bedspread

If the process seems intimidating, the app includes a helpful tutorial video that shows you how easy it is. Once you get into it, it just feels natural: using your fingers to paint, scroll and zoom really leverages the power of the touch interface. Best of all, it's so easy, it makes you look like you did it on a more conventional computer, with expensive photo editing software.

You can e-mail the finished images, or post them to Facebook, Flickr or Twitter from inside the app. You can tell your friends you used ColorSplash, or keep them in the dark and make them think you're a god of image manipulation.

Cinq
Publisher: Tunaverse Media
Price: $0.99

If you take a lot of photos on your iPhone but don't connect it to your computer once in a while, you'll have some photos in one place and other photos in other places. Cinq tackles that problem by letting you transfer pictures to your home computer over 3G or Wi-Fi. It also lets you look at your photo library from your iPhone, which is great if you aren't already carrying all of your photos with you.

If you've only been to Niagara falls when it's warm outside, you're missing out. All of these JPEGs are sitting on my Mac at home.

Cinq works by turning your Mac or Windows computer into a server that listens for requests from the iPhone app. The Cinq server software is a free download. For security, Cinq will only send or receive images if the phone and computer are both logged in to the same Tunaverse.com account. Those accounts are free.

Even if you used iTunes to put your entire photo library on your iPhone, you can still get some use out of Cinq. The pictures on your iPhone are probably shrunken versions of the original photos on your computer, so many of the fine details may be missing. Cinq lets you zoom way in on details of the larger photos on your computer, letting you look closely without hogging up space on your phone. The server resizes the image on the fly and decides how much it needs to send you with each swipe, so it's reasonably quick even over a 3G network.

TwinShot3D
Publisher: Amalgamated Coders Inc.
Price: $1.99

Stereoscopic photography -- the art of taking pictures that give an illusion of depth when viewed with the right equipment -- is an ancient art. TwinShot3D lets you make three-dimensional photos with your iPhone.

3D images look better if you have a distant background, which in this case is my bookshelf. The tower at the bottom left of the photo is made from hotel soap. If you've still got your 3D glasses from two Superbowls ago (or any amber/blue 3D glasses on hand), try them on now.

There are, of course, some limitations. You need 3D glasses for the app to work at all. Knowing this, the publishers support three different kinds of 3D glasses. (If you've still got your Intel 3D glasses from the Superbowl in 2009, tell TwinShot3D you've got amber and blue glasses.)

Real 3D images are made by capturing images from two perspectives simultaneously, to simulate the gap between each eye. Since there's no way to do that on the iPhone, the app prompts you to take one photo, then move the phone a few inches and take another. It's best if your subject doesn't move while you're taking the pictures.

After that, line up the images and tell TwinShot3D to process them to make one 3D image. If it worked, you just might get hooked on making 3D images.

iVideoCamera
Publisher: Laan Labs
Price: $0.99

Most of the apps in this article focus on still photos, but let's not forget that the iPhone's camera can also make video. iVideoCamera takes video recording to the next level, by letting you use effects.

Meowy McMeowerson gets the scoop on what matters to viewers like you!

You can add film scratches, or make it look like you're on television news. A snow globe filter makes light fluffy flakes fall downward, and if you rotate the iPhone, the flakes will change direction, so they'll keep going down. You can make text scroll, pretend you have night vision, or go for a trippy infinte zoom effect. Other effects packs are unlockable for $.99.

Once you're done with your movie, you can post it to YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, Vimeo, or TwelveSeconds. You can also FTP it, e-mail it, send a link to it by SMS, or save it to your camera roll. It even turns the iPhone into a web server for sharing movies on the Wi-Fi network, and gives you an address for friends to type into their browsers.

On top of that, it works on any iPhone, even the ones that don't ordinarily have video capability including the original iPhone and iPhone 3G.

Got a favorite camera app we missed? Drop it in the comments below.