How to Edit Your Instagram Photos

Instagram is my absolute favorite social media platform. As a visual person, and someone who loves and is inspired by all things pretty, it really doesn't get better than Instagram! And the 15,000 of you following me there really make it such an amazing community! A question I've been getting a lot lately is how I edit my photos, so I thought I'd do a quick tutorial on the apps I use and how I use them to edit my IG photos!

1. Unedited photo. Some tips for getting a great photo to start with? Try to use natural lighting if possible, and tap on what you want to focus on before snapping the shot! Make sure to keep your hand steady to get the sharpest image.

2. Facetune. This is one of my favorite apps for the most natural editing. I first use the filters tab and select lighting, where I selected lighter. If a photo is too warm for my liking I'll also select cooler in the lighting tab as well (I didn't do it for this pic). Then, using the details tab, I highlight anything I really want to bring the details out of - in this pic I highlighted the rings.

3. VSCOcam. My all-time favorite for filters, this app has a loyal following of instagrammers that take some amazing shots! One of my favorite filters is the T1 filter - you can adjust the filter strength from 1-12 - for this photo I used 9. Most people ask about my "signature" look of my photos, and it's totally this filter!

4. Instagram. The recent updates have really done an awesome job of increasing the app's editing capabilities, so much so that lots of my fine-tuning I now do directly through the app itself. For this photo, I adjusted the Lux setting a bit (-25), increased the brightness a tiny bit more, upped the saturation a smidge, and increased the sharpness of the photo (my favorite feature).

So there you have it! I will say, this is as complicated as it gets. For lots of my photos I'll simply use VSCOcam and then upload straight to IG. But when I have time to make my pics as pretty as possible, these are all the tools I have at my disposal! I hope you all found this tutorial helpful! Let me know in the comments section below and I'll try doing more similar style posts!