The Best Photo Editing Apps to Step Up Your Instagram Game

Are you trying to take better photos for Instagram?  If so, I’ve rounded up some of the best photo editing apps for Instagram that will transform your photos to high quality and help step up your Instagram game.  There’s no need to bust out the hefty DSLR when you have the best photo editing apps at your hands.  As bloggers and business owners, we all know the importance of a branded Instagram feed and how far a good Instagram photo will go, but the truth is you don’t have to spend hours on those photos.  A few quick edits with apps will do the trick.

Before I get into the best photo editing apps for Instagram (in my opinion), I want to share a quick tip with you.  You can easily transform your pictures by using apps to up adjust  brightness, contrast, exposure (when needed), saturation, and sharpness.  Since each photo is different based on lighting, I recommend you play around with those settings to get a feel for your ideal aesthetic.  At the bare minimum, if you don’t do anything else, be sure to brighten your photos and always, always shoot in natural light.  It will make all the difference!  If natural light isn’t an option, I recommend you use a light box.  Now, onto the best photo editing apps for Instagram that will step up your game:

Afterlight – This app gets my vote for best photo editing app for Instagram.  If you only download one app, let it be this one!  Afterlight is a quick and easy way to adjust photo brightness, saturation, clarity, exposure, contrast, shadows, and color balance all in one.  My personal routine for most photos usually involves upping the brightness, then slightly upping the saturation, which I then tone done by slightly upping the exposure.  Once I have the colors balanced out to my liking, I adjust the sharpness and sometimes, but not often, I’ll adjust the contrast.  You can see these edits in action here.  I recommend just playing around with all the settings to get a feel for how it works and you’ll begin to see what you like the most when it comes down to your branding goals.

VSCO – This is another great all in one app, which allows you to make the same type of brightness, saturation, exposure, etc. adjustments, similarly to Afterlight.  What sets VSCO apart is the available filters and the library grid.  It allows you to upload all of your photos into a library grid, which is helpful in planning out how you want to brand your Instagram feed and gives you a visual idea of what your photos will look like placed next to each other.  The filters are also extremely helpful in giving your photos a cohesive touch.  Just be sure to use the same editing settings and filters for each photo to achieve this.

Snapseed – This app is full of basic editing features like many other photo editing apps, but my personal favorite feature is the selective tool.  This tool is especially helpful when you’re trying to master the flatlay with a white or marble background.  It lets you select a specific area of the photo for touchups, and really comes in handy if you’re trying to brighten a specific area without altering the entire photo.

Facetune – Although the intended use of this app is to make portrait touchups, the whiten feature in this app works wonders for flatlay photos with white backgrounds.  If the lighting of a photo isn’t ideal, my routine usually consists of using the selective tool in Snapseed to brighten the area, then once it’s near white, I use the whiten feature of Facetune.  This feature is especially helpful for product shots if you’re trying to get a product on a solid white background with no gray or yellow tones.

I should note that not all of these photo editing apps for Instagram are free, but the investment of a few dollars is totally worth it.  If you’ve been on the hunt for the best photo editing apps for Instagram, you can’t go wrong with any of these!

If you found this helpful, please like this post on Bloglovin, Pin it, or share using one of the social buttons below so others can easily step up their Instagram game too!

[bctt tweet=”Check out these best photo editing apps to step up your Instagram game” username=”thesouthrnthing”]