Stuff picks out the six best mobile apps to help you pour a bucket of creativity and artistic flair all over your previously pristine photos

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• Hypocam

Let’s start off with something tasteful. Pretty much any photo editor can turn your snaps black and white, thereby instantly making them at least 50% more arty; but Hypocam adds a slew of settings to fiddle with, an inspirational news/images feed, and the means to mimic some of those superb shots by grabbing new filters and applying them to your own miniature masterpieces.

£free (IAPs)/ Android, iOS

• Snapseed

Google’s freebie image editor is the biggest bargain on mobile. If you’re not using it, you should be - and if you are, venture beyond the usual adjustments and cropping tools: delve into Grunge, Drama and Grainy Film, and get experimental with your pics to the point where they beg for mercy. Neatly, the effects you apply are non-destructive, and custom setups can be saved as one-tap filters.

£free /Android, iOS

• Photoshop Camera

This app doesn’t have much to do with the famous desktop product: it’s just a way to quickly add filters to photos. You get plenty of boring options for making food look a smidgeon tastier, but the more out-there stuff is a lot more fun. Give it a go to transform snaps into pop art, add glitches to too-neat pics, or plonk gigantic burgers, chickens and lollipops into an otherwise serene scene.

£free/ Android, iOS

• Retrospecs

If your idea of retro is gaming, you need Retrospecs. Any photo (or video) can be made to appear as it would on anything from a BBC Micro to a Game Boy. For full geek points, drill down into the settings to fiddle with animations, dither options, custom emulator creations, and even a tool to fashion your own character sets. And then get into a fight about whether the C64 or Speccy was best.

£free or £3.99/ iOS

• Printed

You know those lovely vintage posters that trendy types make cooing noises over, with their vibrant colours and massive dots? With this app you can make one in an instant. Load up a pic, tap a filter, and your photo is instantly catapulted decades into the past. Want more control? Fiddle with dot size, saturation and border, before exporting your creation and pretending it was handmade.

£1.99/ iOS

• Prisma

Think that sunset picture looks like a Van Gogh? Turn it into one with Prisma - or a Picasso, a Kandinsky, or art resembling the output of another famous dead brush-botherer. The app’s dizzying array of filters is fortunately twinned with a solid management system; and although hi-res export requires IAP, you can always just sub for a month to export your favourites.

£free (IAPs) /Android, iOS