Imagine... on your iPhone, having the ability to batch edit (simultaneously edit) up to 25 photos in a grid view.

Have you seen a photo and wished that you could color grade your photo the same way?

These are a couple of features of the new app Batched by the ADVA Soft... the company that brings us TouchRetouch.

At the time of writing this review, all profit from Batched goes to support Ukraine

Great app!
"Great batch processing feature, that's the thing that was missing in lightroom and other apps on mobile"
Wow, really impressed
"Incredible results, never imagined this on a phone. Using it on iPad really helps me with my work"
Amazing app!
"Just love it with all those tools that I can use to edit photos simultaneously. Thanks to the developers!"

What I love about this app is the ability to view up to 25 photos at a time as you edit all of them together. Using other apps, you can create a preset to apply one-tap edits to other photos. This option does not allow you to see in an instant grid view, how each photo will be affected.

You can upload a single photo to take advantage of the editing tools or select up to 25 photos. In the settings, you can select either 2 or 3 photos in a row. Selecting 3 per row does allow you to see 15 photos at once without having to scroll down. My preference is 2 photos per row to see more detail in the photo. That may just be my aging eyes!

When you make your initial batch selection, they are all linked for batch editing. You can see the chain-link icon in the top right corner. You can deselect a photo or bring it back into the batch edit by long pressing on the photo. Sometimes a photo in the batch group selection may have different colors, tones or simply require a crop.

In the grid view, all photos that display the link icon will be affected when you use the tools at the bottom of the screen. The photos without the link icon will be left unaffected. To adjust these individual photos, tap on the photo to bring up that photo. Make your adjustments and then tap the back arrow in the top left corner to return to the grid view.

Quick tip: When batch editing photos or creating a preset, stay away from localised editing. This app does not provide masking or selective-area editing for that exact reason. That area that you adjust in one photo may not require it in the next photo.

This tool looks at the color value of one photo and applies it to your batch or individual photo. This tool is similar to the Photoshop color transfer neural filter. This is great for discovering a creative version of a photo or applying sepia tones to a photo, creating a monotone.

Apart from the ability to batch edit, this feature is a clear gap in the mobile photo editing market.

Batched allows you to upload your photo or use the inbuilt Unsplash stock photo search to find photos that have the color scheme you like.

Quick tip: I find searching the genre of the photo is a handy way to find a color scheme that will suit your photo. An example is searching Unsplash for the word 'forest' for a forest or waterfall photo.

Related article: Finding your photography style

The majority of tools are free to use. You can trial the premium subscription tools without the ability to export the photos. That's a fair way to trial all the features.

ADVA Soft is continuing to add new tools, and features and continuing to further enhance the user experience and interface. At the time of writing this article, below, in order are the editing tools available:

Hidden navigation tools inside the editor:
- double-tap on any of the sliders in the editing tools to restore the default setting amount
- tap on an individual photo a second time to zoom in on a single photo.
- when viewing a single photo, double-tap the photo again to quickly zoom in

Light – exposure, contrast, highlights, shadows, whites and blacks.
Quick tip: White and black slider increases and decreases the amount of the photo that becomes completely white or black. This is handy to create high contrast dramatic photo edits.

Color – hue, temperature, tint, saturation and vibrance.
Quick tip: My favourite tool in the color panel is vibrance. The saturation slider increases the intensity of all colors. Vibrance initially affects the more muted colors in the scene. The biggest advantage of adjusting vibrance is the preservation of the skin tones of the people present in the photo.

Details – sharpen, clarity, grain, dehaze, fade and vibrance.
Quick tip: Clarity is a powerful tool to add more structure and details in the mid-tones without introducing artefacts and contrast halos. You will notice that you can add 100 and slide left up to negative to create that ethereal look.

Related article: How to sharpen photos and enhance details using Lightroom mobile app

Transform – rotate, flip, skew, aspect ratio and grid
Quick tip: Go to grid first and select a composition overlay. This app has so many more options than most editors including spirals and triangles. My workflow using this tool is then skew and aspect ratio before dragging corners to crop the photo.

Color transfer – covered above.

Filters – over 100 filters are grouped under the titles black and white, vintage, polaroid, film, urban, nature, portrait, modern and glitch. After tapping on a style of filter, you can tap on each of the filter options to see how each affects the photo. After experimenting, swipe to the right to locate No filter to reset.
Quick tip: Once you find a filter you like, tap on that filter icon again to reveal an opacity slider. This allows you to reduce the intensity of the filter to your liking.

Object removal –similar to using the incredibly advanced algorithm of the Objects tools inside ADVA Soft app TouchRetouch. Tap or swipe over objects to instantly remove objects by filling in the selected area by the surrounding pixels colour and tone references (at least that's how I think the magic works!).
Quick tip: Double-tap or pinch and zoom to get in much closer. This enables you to limit the surrounding area that is used as a source to replace the unwanted area of the photo.

Related: Watch how the object removal and clone stamp work inside TouchRetouch app 

Clone stamp – select exactly where and what you want to replace an object from within the photo. Tap the brush icon to reveal brush size, opacity, hardness and edge awareness.
Quick tip: My preference is to change the opacity to 60 and hardness to 20 for a more natural blend of original and replaced areas. Pinch and zoom, then tap the source area and swipe over the area to be replaced.

Color standout – select a color within the photo that remains while the other colors are muted or reduced to black and white... depending on your setting. This emphasises the color making it pop a bit. Other selective color apps have come and gone or turned into a subscription. With Batched, you get this feature as well as many other cool tools.
Quick tip: Try swiping range to 30 and opacity to 50 to create a unique, faded look

Duotone – add a strong color overlay to your photo. The Batched website describes this tool as a popular printmaking technique. The result is the photo is converted to two color presets, one each for the dark and light areas. It's not the kind of tool I find myself using. However, remember you can tap on the icon again to reduce the opacity.
Quick tip: Tap on the + icon to select two colors of your preference.

Split tone – similar to duotone, I find this tool to be a bit heavy-handed. Select the color within either/both highlights and shadows to be further accentuated.

Selective hue – this is my favorite of all the color tools. It allows much more control and adjustment over the hue, saturation and lightness of different color ranges in the photo.

Curves – adjust the color and luminance of the red, green, blue (RGB) and luminance. This tool is a bit aggressive and requires a delicate touch for those experienced using the curves tool in other apps. Personally, I find the Curves tool inside Snapseed to be more effective.

Related article: Snapseed Curves tool enhances colour and tones

Located inside Settings, you can access succinct and very helpful visual and written tutorials. Played inside the app, you can watch and read the 3-step demonstrations on navigation, batch editing and the clone stamp.

These tutorials provide quick tips on hidden features like pinch and zoom to change single to multi-view gallery, linking, and unlinking. The tutorials are a great way to find hidden shortcuts and features. One that I didn't notice on my own was tapping the edge of the photo to quickly switch between photos.

I am sure there is more to come... these are a clever addition and well worth a quick look

When you tap on the word Export, all photos will be selected. You can tap on any you do not want to include or tap Deselect All and then tap on the individual photos you want to export.

You have a few options here, save as copy (my recommendation), modify original or share. The share option is quite handy to send the photos directly into another app on your iPhone.

This feature is a little hidden... you can change the photo export format and size. After you tap on Export, there is a two horizontal line icon (expand icon). Tap this to reveal format options JEPG, TIFF, HEIC, PNG or None. My recommendation is None. You can also change the file size to small, medium, large or original. Thankfully, ADVA-Soft developers are photographers and understand the best default is None and Original. They don't reduce the file size to save memory space!

Quick tip: My editing workflow using Batched is to use the color transfer, then share them Personally, I find this handy to use

Batched app links:
Website: https://adva-soft.com/batched
App Store: link  IG: link