Instagram has quickly become one of my favorite social media platforms. I love to scroll through endless beautiful photos, and share the beautiful little moments of my day with others. I wish I spent more time with my DSLR camera on hand, but in this day and age I truly take the most photos with my iPhone.
With the time and effort I still take in making sure my photos come out well, I spend some time on a few favorite apps to make each image look its best before publishing on Instagram or saving to my computer. Today, I’m talking about a few of my favorite photography-related apps me and my Instagram feed couldn’t live without.
ProHDR
What it does: I heard about this app from one of my favorite bloggers, Amanda from KevinandAmanda.com. ProHDR is perfect for taking photos of bright landscapes. Have you ever tried to take a photo on your phone of a sunset and find that the background comes out too light and the subject comes out too dark? This app takes two photos at once of the same scene and merges them together, so your photos always come out bright and balanced.
How I use it: I love to use this photo to take photos I wish I had my DSLR camera for. Scenes with lots of color but poor lighting are ideal. I took a photo of a flowering bush in our backyard this afternoon. There was loads of light coming in from behind the bush, and this app made it look perfect!
Afterlight
What it does: This is a great app for general photo editing and styling your photos for Instagram. You can adjust color & brightness, add color filters to adjust the tone of the photo, even apply custom filters and frames to give your pictures vintage touches.
How I use it: My favorite thing about Afterlight is the custom filters. They help add just a bit of definition to my photos and the filters, I feel, have more variety and customizable options than the filters on Instagram. It’s easier to mix and match for the best possible outcome.
Snapseed
What it does: Snapseed is another jack-of-all-trades app. It allows you to do general editing as well as it’s own filters you can adjust for each photo.
How I use it: Snapseed is always my second stop after taking a photo with ProHDR, namely for Snapseed’s HDR Scape and Drama filters. Remember that photo of the bush from above? Here it is again with the HDR Scape filter deployed.
See how it pulls the contrast and vibrance out even more?
I love the use the Drama filter on portraits because I feel it does great things for the contrast of images that always appear bland. Here’s a before and after photo of Maisy playing:
InstaSize
What it does: InstaSize will format any photo for Instagram by cropping it to a perfect square.
How I use it: This is my favorite way to share photos I have taken on my DSLR with my Instagram friends. I upload them to my Mac and instantly pull them from my phone via iCloud. I used to hate cropping and cutting perfectly good images for Instagram, so InstaSize has been a great way to keep everything in the shot. Plus, I find the white borders to be kind of artsy and fun!
Aviary
What it does: Finally, there’s Aviary. This is a really fantastic app that is a definite must-have for Adobe Creative Cloud users. You can sync the app up with your Creative Cloud account and easily edit photos now and later.
How I use it: This is my Photoshop when I’m on the go. I love being able to upload my photos and edit them just as I would on Photoshop while I’m out and about with my family. Super convenient and great!
Do you have a favorite app you want to share? Tell me about it in the comments!
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