Editing pictures for Instagram has become a huge production that involves many steps. I know I’m not the only one that spends time on each photo, making sure it’s as perfect as it can get. Today, I’ll be talking about what apps and tools I use to make sure that picture is Insta-perfect.

If you want to follow along, make sure you have the following three apps: Snapseed, FaceTune and VSCO.

The pictures I take for the blog are mostly taken on my Sony camera and are uploaded through Lightroom onto my computer. Once I have it there, I can download it to my phone (through the Lightroom app) and start editing.

The editing process always begins with Snapseed. This app is hands down my favorite photo editing app because it has so many options and can make even a sub-par picture, pretty freaking great. When I first upload a picture on Snapseed, I fix the Lighting and change the Ambiance through the “Tune Image” tab under Tools to make the lighting exactly what I want it to be. Then I go in and increase the Sharpness and Structure under the Details tab. After that, I go to Tonal Contrast and make the picture even more “crisp” and make the details pop a little more. After that, it’s time to change to FaceTune.

On FaceTune, all the fine “tuning” gets done – blemishes get erased, wrinkles or smile lines get smoothed out and miscellaneous items that shouldn’t be in the picture (i.e. stuff on the ground that you want to erase, etc) get erased. The Details tool is my favorite from Facetune. Whenever I have names of products that I want to be more visible or details on clothing to pop more, I use this tool.

Once that is done, time for the final step – VSCO. This is what I use to make a “theme” for my Instagram and make my pictures all look similar. I have edits saved on previous pictures and I just go in and “copy edits” and paste them onto whatever new picture I’m trying to post, and I just repeat this process every time I post a picture, and this creates a theme for your page. All the pictures have a similar look and lighting and your profile looks more aesthetically pleasing.

Here are some more examples of pictures going through the editing process:

Let’s start with the original. I have a lot of lines on my forehead, the lighting could be a bit better and the sharpness could be increased. This is where Snapseed comes in. I increased the lighting, decreased the ambiance and increased the sharpening. 

Now time for Facetune. I smoothed out the lines on the forehead and made the details on the sweater pop a little more. Voila. We are done.

Let’s do one more example:

So the original got cropped to just focus on the blazer with the corset. The lighting got changed and the sharpening got increased.

After changing the details and lighting, I pasted the photo into VSCO and Copy/Pasted the edits to make the image match the rest of my pictures which changed the lighting of the wall and a bit of the lighting on the blazer. 

Let me know what apps you guys use for editing your pictures and if you learned anything new from this post! As always, thank you for reading and don’t forget to follow me on Instagram, Pinterest and like my Facebook page!