Digital Marketing Blog

Exciting visuals are a cornerstone of modern marketing. Aren’t they?

A picture can say a thousand words, but you need tools to make them more meaningful and relevant to your brand. 

So, make sure to add amazing photo editing apps to your marketing toolkit. This post will mention the following best photo editing apps for Instagram: 

• VSCO

• Adobe Lightroom Photo Editor 

• Snapseed

• Instasize 

• Boomerang from Instagram

• Later

• Canva

These editing tools provide you with a simple way to personalize photos and turn them into perfect Instagram stories.

Before we dig deep into these tools, let’s take a quick look at the importance of creating great content and how Instagram photo editing tools make life easier for marketers: 

How Photo Editing Apps Can Help You Stand Out On Instagram 

Marketing goes beyond delivering simple messages to your customers. It involves desires, needs, and emotions. To take advantage of those strong feelings, you have to add the aww factor to your visual content. 

When it comes down to Instagram marketing, your unedited photos are like great food with poor presentation. It gets the job done but doesn’t quite excite the food lovers. 

Importance Of Instagram Photo Editors

Regardless of your industry, you probably have to face fierce competition on Instagram. This means your content has to be up to scratch if you want to make a positive impact on your bottom line. 

Since its launch in 2010, Instagram has seen a tremendous rise with active monthly users growing to 1 billion. The largest photo-sharing app is one of the top 6  social media networks on the internet. 

Do you think it's easy to grab consumer attention on a platform that hosts more than 25 million business profiles?

While Instagram is an ideal place to attract potential customers through great content, businesses struggle to get noticed. That’s where Instagram photo editors come in handy and can make things a lot easier and effective for Instagram marketers. 

While Instagram filters help you make your photos more catchy, you can get more creative with your images using external editing tools. 

Why You Must Focus On The Quality Of Your Photos

A breathtaking photo can stick with us longer than what we remember from a mundane piece of text. In a fast-paced world, sharing a single stunningly beautiful photo might be more valuable than creating ten blog posts that deliver zero value. 

Your Instagram followers are expecting bright, carefully refined pictures. Not to mention, it’s critical to achieve consistency in your photos. If you’re struggling with quality and consistency in your Instagram photos, it’s time to bring an end to this problem once and for all. 

Use the right photo editor to level up your Instagram game and stay ahead of the curve. Here is what you can do with photo editing apps: 

• Basic retouching and repair 

• Edit, resize

• Remove unwanted elements 

• Background scaling 

• Add effects and filters 

• Add interesting elements like text and graphics 

• Modification and alteration 

Best Photo Editing Apps For Instagram 

There are tons of photo editing options available in the app market. We’ve come up with a list of 7 best photo editing apps for Instagram: 

1. VSCO 

VSCO is at the top of our chart because the app is consistently ranked as the best Instagram photo editing app available on both Android and iOS app markets. VSCO is so popular that its branded hashtag #vscocam is one of the most used hashtags on Instagram. 

The app offers a broad range of presets, enabling users to compensate for varying exposures for images. Since VSCO presets have a mix of bright and moody tones, the app is particularly ideal for nature or outdoor photography. 

You can easily adjust your photos to make them more suitable for your overall Instagram aesthetics. If you want to have a consistent look on your feed, VSCO is a must-have editing tool. 

Features

VSCO is an easy-to-use app that offers tons of capabilities. Some of its notable features include: 

• Filters: A variety of filters makes it easy to enhance the quality of your photos without making them look too filtered.  

• Clarity: The tool makes a photo look sharper and clearer. Use this feature to bring out the detail in landscape images.

• Skin tone: Quickly fix off-looking skin tone color to a portrait.

• Tint: Easily change the color tint of a photo. The colors in a photo will turn more towards a green tone if you swipe the tint tool to the left.

• Shadows tint: Add color to the dark areas of your photos. 

• Highlight tint: Add certain colors to the light areas of a photo to make it look more lively.

• X-kew: Stretches and modifies a photo along the x-axis to change the angle by moving the x-kew to the left and right. 

• Y-kew: Like x-kew, y-kew modifies the focus point of a photo along the y-axis. 

Pricing

It costs $19.99 a year to become a member and enjoy 130 exclusive filters, skin-tone warming tools, picture borders, GIF capabilities, and a lot more. 

VSCO is available for Android and iOS. 

2. Adobe Lightroom Photo Editor 

Adobe products are globally known for their remarkable photo-editing features. Adobe Lightroom Photo Editor is no exception.

You can use the app to strengthen your visual presence on Instagram. All you have to do is use Lightroom’s editing tools and turn basic photos into professional ones by adjusting their shadows, hue, exposure, saturation, and other elements 

Features 

The innovative filters, tools, and settings in Adobe Lightroom let you explore all the possible ways to create the most powerful photos. 

• Presets: Possibilities to customize a photo are endless with 121 Lightroom presets. Create the perfect photos for your Instagram by combining customizable presets. Save your favorite filters and settings to save time and ensure consistency. 

• Easy-to-use slider: Control the light and color properties of your photos with great speed and ease. Color Mixer and Tone Curves make your photos more precise and clear. 

• Crop and rotate tools: Get the right size and aspect ratio with Lightroom. Invert or straighten your photos to express your creativity. 

• Noise reduction: Sharpen photos to reduce distraction or highlight a subject. With noise reduction, you can dive into the details of your visuals. 

• Geometry tools: With Lightroom geometry tools, you can get a better perspective by cleaning up skewed lines. 

• Healing brush: Use the healing brush to get rid of unwanted elements and get a masterfully clean and sharp image. 

• Cloud: All edits are automatically saved to the cloud, which means you wouldn’t lose your work. 

Pricing 

While you get a free trial to test the tool, premium features give you access to premium features. Lightroom Plan and Photography Plan (20GB) costs $9.99/mo. You can get the Photography Plan (1TB) for $19.99/mo. 

3. Snapseed

Snapseed is a photo-editing Instagram app that enables photographers to edit and fix photos on the go.

Now owned by Google, Snapseed gives you a broad assortment of tools and features to help you create amazing photos for your Instagram. 

Not all of us have the money or desire to use Adobe Lightroom. If you need a free, simple, and versatile photo editing app, make sure to add Snapseed to your app collection. 

Features

Apart from presets, Snapseed allows you to perform some serious photo-editing tasks with its 29+ tools and features. Some of them include: 

• The ‘Looks’ tab: It works like Instagram’s filter function but offers a more comprehensive approach. Each look implements a predefined set of edits to your photos. 

• Auto adjustment: The ‘Tools’ tab opens a menu of functions that you can use to perform basic editing. Auto adjustment fine-tunes your photo based on what the tool thinks is best. 

• Tune image: It’s probably the most valuable feature that allows you to adjust visual elements such as contrast, brightness, ambiance, warmth, and shadows. 

• Perspective: As the name suggests, perspective allows you to manipulate the perspective of your photos. If you’re standing slightly off-center in a photo, this feature will get it fixed. 

• Healing: This feature can be very helpful when you have to remove any part of a photo. 

• Brush and selective: Edit a particular part of a photo in an innovative way. Use your finger as a brush to adjust different elements of your photos. 

Looking for something even better? Understandably, most Instagrammers have very specific photo editing needs.

Instasize meets those needs faster, which means you don’t have to dive deep into complex editing tools such as color correction. You can choose from a range of filters to convert your good photo into great ones. 

Features 

• Filters: Choose a filter and adjust the intensity simply by tapping on the filter. Hold down a filter you want to apply and drag it to wherever you want it to be on the lineup. You can even layer multiple filters on one image. Make sure to check out top-performing filters on Instasize. The app has over 80 stunning filters. 

• Crop: If your photos are just okay, highlight an element that you like best or crop out unwanted side areas. 

• Settings: Instasize gives you more control over the look of your photos. You can try out different settings to adjust your photos’ sharpness, brightness, saturation, tint, warmth, highlights, and shadows. Don’t forget to add a vignette or grain to get a more dramatic effect. 

• Power beauty tools: Clean up your photos like never before. While the free version gives you access to blemish removing and enhancing tools, the premium version allows you to add glow for rejuvenated, moisturized looking skin and whiten for brightening smiles. 

• Add text: Instasize has over 30 designer text styles which allow you to add stylize text overlays to your visuals. 

• Photo colleges: The app offers a no-fuss feature to create photo collages. Use up to six images and turn them into one image with ease. You can even cut a single photo into pieces and recreate it as a photo grid.  

Instasize is clearly the most powerful Instagram photo editing app that up-level your Instagram game.  

Pricing 

The standard free version allows users to access many of Instasize great features such as original filters, editing tools, video editing, and vintage overlays.

The premium plan, which costs $4.99/mo, takes your photo editing capabilities to the next level. It lets you enjoy over 100 presets, unique backgrounds, advanced beauty tools, web stories, and exclusive content. 

Pro Tip: You can access all of Instasize’s filters for free if you’re an Instasize subscriber. 

Compatibility: iOS and Android

5. Boomerang From Instagram

Launched in 2015, Boomerang from Instagram helps you turn everyday moments into fun Instagram stories. After the massive success of TikTok’s creative video editor, Instagram decided to update it’s Boomerang mode and added three new effects. 

The app makes it possible to transform basic selfies into funny videos or you can capture someone jumping off a diving board, flying back and forth through the air. Just press a button and the app will do the rest. 

You can take a burst of photos and combine them together to make a mini video and share it with your Instagram followers. The app automatically saves your stuff to your camera roll. 

If you’re ready to experiment with motion in an exciting way, try out Boomerang. Here are the new Boomerang effects that further enhance your Instagram content: 

• Slowmo: Slow down your clips to increase their length and make them more captivating. 

• Duo: The app allows you to rewind your videos and add a glitchy transition. 

• Trimming: Trim your video and decide where your loops start and stops. 

• Echo: Create a double vision effect by adding a motion blur to video frames. 

Shoot a boomerang within the Instagram Stories camera. Previously, users had to use a dedicated Boomerang app to create those back-and-forth looping GIF-style videos. 

6. Later

One of the biggest challenges for Instagrammers is to make all of their individual photos look great beside each other. If you want to make your Instagram feed look amazing, use Later’s visual planner to see how your content would look like in the feed before you post it. 

Drag and drop your images onto the Visual Instagram Planner and rearrange them to find the perfect balance. You can schedule posts once you’re happy with how they look. 

Later makes it super easy to visually plan your content and convert Instagram viewers into followers. Here is what else you can do with Later on the web: 

Features: 

• Add Filters: Later comes with 24 filters to improve the quality of your photo when scheduling them. Choose a filter and adjust the intensity to get the feel you need. 

• Crop: This feature is of great help when you have to edit a photo for different social media networks. You can either select a social platform crop size or customize your crop size. 

7. Canva

Canva is one of the most used and favorite photo editing tools available on the web. It’s hard to skip Canva when it comes to creating eye-catching Instagram photos.

You can use the Instagram Stories templates in Canva to create enticing visuals using your brand’s fonts and colors. 

Canva is a great app to enhance your regular Instagram posts with easy-to-use editing tools. Whether you want to overlay your photos with text or add graphics, Canva will let you play with your creativity. 

Features

• Teamwork: Canva is probably the best tool when you have to create designs together with your team. You can invite your team and set their access permission with ease. 

• Texture for Hoomy: Choose from a range of textured backgrounds from fanciful patterns to real-world fabrics. 

• Soft photo filters: Choose from a broad assortment of filters and have unique Instagram stories for all kinds of occasions. Click through different filters to see what looks best. 

• The Blur Slider: If you want to make your photos soft and dreamy, use Canva’s blur slider to get rid of harsh angels. Move the slider to the right to gently blur your photo until every bit of bump looks smooth and creamy. 

Pricing 

While the free version is ideal for individuals, the Pro plan ($9.95/user/month) enables productivity and ease of customization. The Enterprise plan comes with more great features and a price tag of $30/mo. 

Final Thoughts

Not all of your competitors know how a simple photo editing app can dramatically improve the quality of photos. So, what are you waiting for? Be the first one to inspire your audience with cool Instagram photos. Beat the competition on Instagram with your stunning photos.