This is the best photo editing app for your phone or tablet

Enlight

As smartphone photography has become the dominant way people document and share their lives online, photo editing apps have rapidly improved — and then plateaued.

My favorite until now, Photoshop Express, offers users powerful tools to filter and tone their images, bringing some of the rudimentary, core features of Adobe Photoshop Lightroom to mobile devices.

Other apps, like Snapseed, VSCO, and even Instagram's built-in editing tools now offer similar features.

Enlight, from the makers of Facetune, represents a revolutionary leap over what Photoshop Express and its ilk can do. Filtering and toning are part of this app, but the technology goes much farther. In essence, this is an app that empowers users to pull off tricks we'd expect from a design professional using the full version of Adobe Photoshop on a computer — but any user should be able to learn them with a few swipes of a finger.

This is a truly impressive piece of technology — easily worth its $4 price in the iOS app store.

We'll start with this un retouched image.

Like any photo editing app, Enlight lets you adjust brightness. I'll use it here to blow out the background. However, my subject's face now looks way off.

But Enlight lets you create "masks" – which let you paint on and erase adjustments on different parts of the image.