The Best Photo Editing Apps

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In this day and age, everyone has some form of social media. Whether it’s Facebook, Instagram, or even a dating app, you will need high-quality images. Today we’re sharing the best photo editing apps to enhance your images.

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First things first, we took this image to show what these photo editing apps really do! Of course, your images will have slightly different editing steps. But, we wanted to show you a before-and-after to see what can be done with these great tools!

This is gorgeous Olly! She looks stunning as is, but we wanted to create some fun options for our different social media platforms.

POMELO

This app is awesome for fun-looking photos. You can add all kinds of sun flares (and change the opacity of them to create more natural looking light leaks), film, Polaroid, and dreamy faded-looking filters.

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In this image, we added the “Gradual” light leak, and took it down to about a quarter strength. We wanted to add just a wash of warmth to her face. Next, we thought we would add more colour. To do this we, saved this image then RE-IMPORTED it with this sun flare edit (you can’t do double filters on this app, so we had to create the new image file to re-import and edit more).

We then added the “Portra” film filter. Portra is known to be the absolute best film stock for portrait shots, so why not try this filter that recreates it. It adds a beautiful cool tinge to the image.

PICS ART

This app has so many editing options it’s practically a pocket Photoshop. You can edit levels and curves, create controlled blurring and grain, draw on the image, remove blemishes, or add one of the many filter options.

We wanted to try a fun option with this app because, why not!?

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We went into the “FX” option and into the Pop Art section. We used the “Colour Gradient” filter and brought the Fade up to 70%. This you can play around with a lot! Try selecting your favourite colours from the colour wheel, and play around with the saturation.

VSCO

This app is a long-time favourite in the photography community. VSCO started with desktop presets for Adobe Lightroom and Photoshop, then launched a hugely successful app that allows users to apply these presets on mobile. This app is known for creating rich, and unique, tones to images. There are tons of free options, as well as awesome paid for ones!

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For this image, we stuck to their amazing “B1” black and white filter. It has the perfect amount of contrast, and made Olly’s eyes pop!

LIGHTROOM

This professional photo editing program is the industry standard for creating bold, high-quality, sharp images. It was so exciting to see them open up this formerly subscribed for app to all mobile users. This app is exactly what its desktop program is – professional. If you are greener with post-production editing, this app may take a few tries to get used to. But, its high-quality processing and customizability makes it stand out from the rest.

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For this image, we wanted to go for a more natural, but sharp, look. We first went into the filter tab (the three circles) and chose the “Dynamic” colour filter. This gave the image a really strong-contrasted look. However, it also added quite an orange hue to Olly’s face. We needed to fix this up! We went into the tool tab (slider bars), and went into the “Basic” section. We brought the saturation down to -44% to pull the orange out, and brought the highlights up to -69%. This made her eyes and skin pop without having any weird colouring.

A COLOR STORY

Our longtime favourite bloggers, A Beautiful Mess, released a photo editing app earlier this year. There’s not a ton of free presets to try within the app, but the ones that are there rock!

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We went to the essentials tab and used the “Ice Ice” filter. We then went into tools and played around with the curves. We brought up the brightness here to make her skin look brighter. Next, we brought up the saturation just a bit, since we lost a bit of colour when brightening with the curves. We took up the sharpness as well, to make her beautiful eyes really stand out.

Each person will prefer a different image from this lot. Some may even prefer the original image! We just wanted to show you these powerful photo editing apps that can help take your images to the next level for your social media. Don’t hesitate to comment below to ask questions about these apps – we like to think we’re semi pro at using them now ;).

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