Apps To Make Your Instagram Photos Stand Out

If you’ve been following me for a minute, you can already tell I’m obsessed with Instagram and it is hands down my favorite social media. If you haven’t been following me, do iiiiit!
I’m taking part in the #The100DayProject by The Great Discontent, so I’ve been posting daily illustrations and drawings and also random inspiration for 61 days already! Pats herself in the back I’m not the best photographer (not even close) so having these apps have helped my pictures look cleaner and brighter and more colorful, hopefully you like them too!

I’m having a lot of fun with it and have narrowed down my favorite (paid & free) apps that I use to edit my photos before putting them up on IG.

Afterlight

This one is a paid app that does everything from editing your pic’s brightness, saturation, exposure, etc. to adding overlays so you can do something like this:

and give your lettering somewhere pretty to lay on 🙂 (The background photo was found on We Heart It)

I use it mostly to adjust my photos’ brightness and saturation and adjust the highlights and shadows, since I like them to be bright and colorful. My favorite way to use this app, and the reason I think it’s worth it is because of the option to lay one picture over another to create the effect you see above. If you find that you will use this option a lot, I recommend looking into this app.

PicLab & PicLab HD

PicLab is free, while PicLab HD is $  . They are both quite similar, but you get a lot more with the HD (they are two different apps) and you have a lot more editing capabilities with PicLab HD. You can add text with both apps, but you can curve and otherwise twist your text with HD. In both apps there are packs of elements (like different floral motifs, arrows, quotes, etc) that you can add to your pics to spruce them up.

Here’s an example of one of my photos with a quote from one of the PicLab packs:

Snapseed

Snapseed is one that I had a long time ago but ended up deleting in a fit of desperation, as you do when your phone announces “Storage Almost Full” and you need to make some space for that new game/app you found in the app store that you HAVE TO HAVE.
It’s a great app that has some unique features so I’m finding myself using it a lot lately. You can brighten up your photos selectively by using the “selective” tool and placing a dot on the spot you want to brighten up and sliding your finger sideways (it took me freakin’ forever to figure out how to do this for some reason) to adjust the brightness. Another cool feature this app has is the brush tool that helps you change the exposure, temperature and saturation of your images only in the spots you choose by swiping the brush over the area you want to adjust. I used the tools mentioned to edit this photo:

Studio Design

Studio probably has the most variety of elements of any of these apps, they constantly come out with seasonal packs and themed packs of elements (all free to download). There are floral packs, birthday, travel, space icon packs, and anything you can imagine. That’s probably my favorite feature of the Studio app. If you want more photo editing capabilities, though, this might not be the app to do that in, since they only offer some filters and you can’t edit the photo very much beyond that. It does have a text tool, shapes, frames and other tools that make it worth your while.

 

I’m curious to know what your favorite photo editing apps are, I’m always looking to try new ones!
What’s your favorite social media outlet and why? Let’s talk in the comments!

With love,