A recent study suggests 1/3 of all photos are taken using an iPhone. That’s an astonishing number, but simply posting those photos as is to Flickr or Facebook usually isn’t exactly going to rock the world.

Instead, let’s take a look at some of the more uniquely creative ways you can enhance your photos on the iPhone, such as adding text, making a one panel cartoon, taking a 3D photo, or making your scene look like it’s just a model diorama – and I’ll tell you now, you won’t find Instagram here.

Over ($1.99)

For the want of a better word, Over is a digital postcard app. It allows you to add gorgeous text onto your photos, then share them out to Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Tumblr and email.

The interface is a little non-standard, yet quite beautiful. Choose or take a photo from the start screen, then double tap to edit the text. Tap the small yellow triangle to bring up the main menu. You can change the font, size, tint on the photo (varying degrees of darkness, by default the photo is slightly darkened to make the text really pop), and quickly share your creation out to various networks.

The fonts are where this iPhone photo app stands out; a great selection of really attractive typefaces to enhance your image. An in-app purchase allows for even more, but the included selection is quite extensive.

Basically, if you have something to say and it’s relevant to the photo, use Over to say it nicely.

Halftone ($0.99)

Do you love comic books? You’ll love Halftone then. The app hides a surprising amount of functionality, including a fully featured photo editor before you even get to the comic making stage of the process. The app then automatically adds the half tone effect (“dot colors” to you and I), and lets you choose paper, before moving on to adding speech bubbles and stamps.

One thing I will say is that while the results are pretty impressive, the interface is incredibly fiddly on the small iPhone screen. That said – this is a halftoned shot from our wedding photos which took about 2 minutes to make (please, forgive my pink shirt. Guys have no choice in what to wear on these day long photo sessions!)

Meme Generator (Free)

I talked about the OSX version before – the iPhone app is also free (though ad-supported), and a little more limited in terms of sharing options – you can only email, tweet, or send to Facebook. Meme creation-wise though, it’s functional – pick a base meme or upload a custom photo, edit the top and bottom text, change the size – what else do you need exactly?

I was suprised to find it syncs with the desktop app too – silently, through iCloud I presume – so all my desktop creations were also available on the iPhone app. If you wanted to submit directly to Reddit then, you could just jump on the desktop to do that.

3D Camera ($1.99)

I featured this before as one of the ways you could make 3D images for cross-eyed viewing. Rather than talk about it again, I’d encourage you to go over and read about the principles of cross-eye stereography, then admire my poor sleeping ferret being attacked by metal creatures from outer space:

TiltShift Generator ($0.99)

An old app, but it does what it says and it does it well. I taught you how to add a tilt-shift effect in Photoshop ages ago, but this app makes it even easier. For those of you who don’t know, tilt-shift is a photographic technique that gives the illusion of something being a toy or a model diorama.

Check out this example I made with the app of my little veg patch.

The effect is applied automatically, but you’ll want to use the focus editor to change where the scene is centred around – one component of tilt shift is that the rest of the scene is strongly blurred out, as if you were looking at something up close (apologies if my technical explanation is wrong there, I’m no photographer as you can probably tell). Saturation and contrast controls help to give it that fake, painted look.

Do you have a favorite iPad or iPhone photo app for creative photography that doesn’t just consist of Instagram-like filters? Let us know in the comments and I’ll check it out.

Also, you might be interested in 4 creative projects you can do on your Mac, and how to make a legendary movie trailer on your iPad.