Instagram is one of the most popular social networking sites, where you can share your photos with friends and family. After uploading your photo, you can apply many effects or edit them using several apps. You can edit photos using the Instagram app. Applying filters helps add contrast and saturation to a photo as well as making it look more interesting for your followers to view and comment on.
Table of Contents
Best Apps For Instagram Edits
- VSCO
VSCO is a minimalist social media platform of its own—there are no follower counts, comments or ads. But it’s also an easy-to-use photo editing app that has about 20 free photo presets and standard editing tools (think brightness, contrast, saturation, grain, all that good stuff). You can edit photos within the app and then save them to your Camera Roll to post on Instagram.
VSCO presets
The paid version of VSCO, called VSCO Membership, costs $20 a year and comes with over 200 photo presets, advanced photo editing tools and tips for members.
- Darkroom
Darkroom earned a 2020 Apple Design award for its innovation.
You can “favorite” and delete images from your Camera Roll directly in the app. There are 12 photo filters available in the free version, plus the ability to save your own custom presets.
Darkroom
Darkroom Plus has premium filters, a curves tool, flag and reject, and 4K video editing. It’s $6 a month or $62 a year, but they also have a “forever” membership for $69.
- Photoshop Express
This photo editor app is better suited for more advanced users (a background in Photoshop is, of course, an asset), but it’s navigable for beginners, too.
Photoshop Express was specifically designed for use on a mobile device. The app’s features include retouching, enhancing, and all that good Photoshop stuff, plus themes, stickers and overlays.
There’s also a smart healing tool—it took two seconds to do a very rudimentary erase of the tree on the right side of this photo (you’ll notice the fence looks a bit funky).
Photoshop Express
If you’re new to this app, there’s a great how-to page for getting started.
Photoshop Express is free to download and use. The premium version features multiple layers, auto selection, selective editing and advanced healing (you know, for fixing fences). It’s $47 a year.
- Snapseed
Snapseed is an awesome free photo and video editing app for beginners. Think standard filters, basic photo editing tools and a very simple user experience, but a little more advanced than Instagram’s in-app editing.
The app features a handy tutorial that walks new users through exactly how to use it.
Snapseed
It’s totally free, so you won’t be inundated with flirtatious “Premium” or “Pro” ads.
- Hootsuite’s Photo Editor
We can’t miss the opportunity to shout out (hoot out?) our own free in-app photo editor.
When you use Hootsuite to schedule and plan your social media posts, you can edit photos directly from the app with our user-friendly tools.
Hootsuite
This system is fully integrated into our social media management dashboard (making Hootsuite the only app you need for building, editing and scheduling posts).
Here’s a full rundown of how to use the tool:
- Focos
Focos is a free app that assists in the taking of photos, but you can use it to edit pictures after they’re taken, too.
The app can re-focus portrait photos that have already been taken, create different lens effects and simulate a quality of photo most commonly associated with DSLR cameras.
It also has an AI engine that can automatically calculate the depth of field.
Focos
The ideal user of this app has some background knowledge in photography—the editing tools are geared towards folks who understand things like aperture and bokeh.
- Lensa
Along with the standard filters and tools that most photo editing apps have, Lensa features trendy effects and an adjustment tool that allows you to edit the foreground and background of the photo separately.
Lensa
Lensa is free for 7 days. After the free trial, it’s $47 a year.
- Adobe Creative Cloud Express
This app comes stocked with templates for different types of graphics, from Instagram posts to posters to business cards.
Instagram-wise, Creative Cloud express is great for adding text and effects to photos.
Adobe Creative Cloud Express
This app also has a huge library of stock images, effects and design elements for free and an animation feature for creating more dynamic content.
Without paying, you can store up to 2GB of photos and videos in the cloud — and for $100 a year, you get the ability to resize photos, access to more stock images, one-tap branding and 100 GB of storage.
- Photoleap by Lightricks
Photoleap is a very intuitive app. It features a Quickart function that enables the user to select from a variety of templates—for example, this color pop template:
Photoleap by Lightricks color pop option
The app also offers readymade graphics you can work with, plus the standard photo editing tools that most photo editing apps have (cropping, adjusting brightness, filters, all that jazz) for free.
Photoleap Pro is $11.49 a month, or a one-time purchase of $105. Premium features include access to their complete art and graphics library.
- AirBrush
This app was made for selfie editing—there’s a “beauty magic” feature that can automatically change things like nose, chin and lip size, and recognize and remove dark circles and acne.
The app also has a one-tap makeup application tool for lips, blush, contour, mascara, etc. It’s best used on images of faces and hair, but the “smooth” function also works on hand skin (take a look at the left side of the hand in the image below).
Airbrush option
Airbrush Premium includes 120 filters, 20 makeup looks, and 25 retouching tools, all for $44 a year.
Best apps to edit photos for instagram free
- Canva
Thanks to its library of customizable templates, Canva has become one of our favorite tools for designing unique and eye-catching Instagram Stories! Whether posting a casual shot or trying to drive traffic to a website, you can use the Instagram Stories templates in Canva to create eye-catching designs using your brand’s colors and fonts.
Of course, you can use Canva to enhance regular Instagram posts with the ability to edit photos and easily overlay them with text, graphics, and other design elements—including your brand’s fonts and logo—to create content that truly resonates with followers.
InstagramPhotography1
Photo by Canva
Download: Free (web, iOS, Android)
- VSCO
VSCO is consistently ranked by photographers as one of the best Instagram photo editing apps on the market—mainly because of its high-quality filters. The app is actually so popular that its branded hashtag #vscocam is now one of the most-used hashtags on all of Instagram!
InstagramPhotographyApps1
Photo by VSCO
VSCO filters are particularly good for outdoor and nature photography, as they have a mix of moody and bright tones that can help balance out scenes to match your overall Instagram aesthetic. This is great if you’re going for a consistent look on your feed.
Download: Free (iOS and Android)
- Later
One of the hardest parts of making your Instagram feed look amazing is figuring out how to make all your individual photos look good beside each other. Thankfully, Later’s visual Instagram planner shows you exactly what your feed would look like before photos are posted.
InstagramPhotographyApps2
Photo by Later
All you have to do is drag and drop your photos onto the Visual Instagram Planner and rearrange them until you find the perfect balance for your feed. Once you’re happy with how everything looks, posts are scheduled, so you won’t have to worry about it later on.
Download: Free (web, iOS, Android)
- A Color Story
A Color Story allows users to achieve a consistent look across individual posts. Let’s say that your brand color is millennial pink, for example. You can download specific filter packs that perfectly suit that color palette or customize your own filters to add a cast of millennial pink to any photo you’d like!
InstagramPhotography2
A Color Story
Another great thing about A Color Story is that it partners with a ton of Instagram influencers who create custom filter packs and effects, which can be accessed in the mobile app. You can also use the desktop version of A Color Story in collaboration with Photoshop or Lightroom for even more fine-tuned editing.
Download: Free (iOS and Android)
- FaceTune
This app tends to get a lot of flak for being the “pretty app,” but it’s really so much more than that! Unlike VSCO and A Color Story, which are more general photo editing apps, FaceTune is specifically designed for editing and perfecting portraits and selfies.
InstagramPhotography3
Photo by FaceTune
Most photographers use FaceTune to blur out colors and tones that don’t match their Instagram aesthetic, but it offers many other features from subtle effects (like skin smoothing and color correction) to more dramatic, full-on digital makeovers.
Conclusion
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