Ambitious Photo Tools That Avoid Making You Feel Dumb If you want to share a photo on the fly, there's Instagram and then there's everyone else. If you want to add cool effects, there are about a thousand apps to consider, among them Snapseed ($5 on Apple), Vignette ($4 on Android), Hipstamatic ($2 on Apple), Paper Camera ($1 on Apple and $2 on Android) and Photosynth (free on Apple). But for creating and sharing entire photo albums, far fewer options exist. Thankfully, that short list includes two newly released apps, iPhoto ($5) and Pholium ($5), that will appeal to many photographers. IPhoto is comprehensive and easy to use, which is one of the toughest tricks for an app. Comprehensive apps are like the really smart guy at the party whom people like to talk about, but no one wants to talk to. More often than not, ambitious apps are so complicated that they leave you with the feeling that you're stupid. But Apple, which makes iPhoto, has done a great job of making the software accessible, especially on the iPad, where the app's Help feature is one of the best I've seen. If you touch the question mark icon, the screen fills with labels explaining every feature on the page, as well as tips for how to activate other elements in a particular feature, and you can tap most of the labels for fuller explanations. Sadly, the current iPhone version lacks the same help feature. It's significantly tougher to learn as a result. Of course, not everything in iPhoto needs explaining, and lots of neat stuff happens without your even lifting a finger. If you take multiple photos of one subject over the course of a weekend, for instance, the app will detect the similarities and display all matching photos in the viewer so you can quickly eliminate shots you don't like. Once you've chosen the good ones, you can manipulate images in a wide variety of ways, with extremely smart controls. With the Brushes feature, you drag your finger across parts of the photo to change its light, color saturation, red eye or clarity, among other things. If you mess up, the Undo button prevents permanent damage, as does the Revert command, which returns the image to its untouched version. The app has many more features, but among my favorites is its Journals. If you select multiple images from the photo library, the app builds a journal that you can easily customize by dragging photos around and adding captions. IPhoto can add the date, weather and location data to the journal, among other information, and when it's complete you can publish it to iCloud or iTunes. There's one drawback: If you don't have a subscription for expanded iCloud storage beyond the five gigabytes of free space, it can be hard to share your journals. Strangely, Pholium suffers from a similar affliction. The app makes it easy to create beautiful albums, but difficult, or at least costly, to share. That's fine, though, if you want to simply create nice photo journals and transmit them to your big screen via the iPad's Air Play feature, or just hand around the iPad when you're around friends and family. After importing images from your photo library, Pholium prompts you to write a title and subtitle for the opening page of a new album. Choose those words carefully; they are the only text that you can add to the album. From there, you build the album as you would, say, a Powerpoint file; you open a page, select photos to add and Pholium drops them into place. While choosing photos for the album, you can pause and tweak them several ways. The photo retouching features include brightness, contrast, exposure, black and white, sepia and vibrance. Those controls are enough for most situations, but more ambitious photo artists will feel confined. You can always retouch photos in another app and save them to your photo album before opening Pholium. From there, it's a matter of tapping the photos you want to use on a particular two-page spread and dragging them to different parts of the layout. Pholium also makes it easy to enlarge, shrink or overlap images at this stage. You can adjust the color of the album, and on any page the undo button reverts the images or layout to their previous state. The final product looks quite nice to my eye, although I missed the ability to add captions. I would be shocked if that feature wasn't added to future versions of the app. Once the album is done, your first impulse will most likely be to share it, but here's where the real trouble starts. If your recipient happens to own Pholium too, they see your photo album in its full glory. But if they don't, they only see a lower-resolution PDF version of the album's images, in a format that's much more generic than what you had created. And even if your recipients own Pholium, sharing can get costly. Each album you create can be shared with only 10 recipients for free, and you may also create 10 albums in all. Extra albums are $1 each, and if you want to share an album with more than 10 people, a set of 10 additional recipients costs $1. It all seems slightly expensive and perhaps unsustainable strategy for Pholium. Katherine Madariaga, a spokeswoman, said the company might let users share their albums in Web browsers in future versions of the app. That, and at least a slight price drop, would make the app more palatable. Until then, though, I would use my $5 to buy iPhoto and spend any extra cash on additional iCloud storage so I could share my photo albums as widely as I want. Ice Jewelry (free on Apple) is a sweet bit of shopping software from the online retailer Ice.com. Using your photos, it lets you try on jewelry as you shop. ... Hooked (free on Android) watches the games you download and how you play them, and recommends others. ... NoteStar from Yamaha (free on iPad), a sheet-music app for keyboard players, is well designed and versatile.