How I Edit My Instagram Photos 2019: Presets + Apps
Hello loves! Incase you missed my announcement on Instagram I’ve now made my Lightroom presets that I’ve been editing my photos with available to y’all to purchase! This is something that I’ve been wanting to do for a few months, and I’m so glad I finally made a couple presets that I’m proud of for y’all to apply to your own photos. I thought it would be helpful to show y’all how I use my presets, along with what other apps I use to edit my Instagram photos. This is probably the most popular topic that I get questions about on Instagram. Most of the apps and features I use for editing are free or available at a low price; anyone can do this!
A few notes about my presets. I have two available for purchase at $5 each right now: Night Owl and Golden Glow. I plan on adding more in the future once I perfect them! These presets are only for the free mobile Lightroom app, not the desktop version. On the preset page I have instructions on how to install them, but fee free to shoot me a question on Instagram or email if you get stuck! My goal with these is to help y’all achieve beautiful Instagram feeds with minimal effort at a great price. Now let’s hop into the editing process!
Did you know that you don’t need an Adobe subscription to edit photos in the Lightroom app?! This is the app I use to create presets, apply presets to photos, adjust settings such as exposure and temperature, and crop my photos to satisfy Instagram’s 4:5 portrait ratio. What I love about Lightroom is that it is a more advanced editing application, so the quality of your photo is not compromised when you make adjustments. The phot below was edited with my Golden Glow preset ... and a made a couple of adjustments including exposure and temperature.
Before switching to Lightroom, I was a die hard VSCO user for performing the bulk of my photo editing. Now I use the app to plan my Instagram feed. Once I finish editing a photo, I’ll import it into VSCO to see how it looks with the rest of my photos. If the photo seems off, I know I need to go back into Lightroom and make some more adjustments. If you still use VSCO to edit, my favorite filters are HB2 and A6.
One of my most asked questions is “how do you get stars on your photos?” The answer is PicsArt! I go to the sticker tab and search for stars, then place them on the photo. You can also use this feature to apply any type of design over a photo.
I use this app for adding film-like borders to my photos and creating collages for my feed and stories. There are so many different settings on this app and I recommend it if you want to take your stories to the next level. This is a free app, but I paid extra for the FF1 pack.
I don’t use this app as much as I used to, but it still comes in handy from time to time. My favorite features are the whiten, smooth, and tones tools. I use the whiten feature to brighten up any whites that look dull or discolored in a photo. The smooth tool can be dangerous and can tend to look fake, so I only use it if I have something on my face that’s extremely noticeable i.e. a huge zit (I don’t use this on every photo, just special circumstances). And finally, I use the tones tool for color correcting (ex. if one part of my skin looks completely different from the rest I use this tool to make adjustments).
I hope y’all found this post useful! Happy editing y’all!
Slap on some lipstick and smile
Channing