Everyone is looking to take professional-grade photos. The truth is that photos are only as good as the photographer—so practicing as often as you can is important. But, of course, even professional photographers benefit from editing their photos. This can be done very easily using filters or by manually editing your photo.
There are a lot of apps available for editing. So many that it can be overwhelming. But whenever someone asks me what I use to edit photos, I tell them that I actually have three go-tos. And below I’m going to share what those are—so you can start editing like a professional.
iPhone Built-In App: If you use an iPhone then you already have an amazing editing tool at your fingertips. I imagine the same is true for Android users. You really need to look no further than the software included with your smartphone to perform simple and appealing edits to your photos. Whether you want to adjust the brightness, shadows, or exposure—you can do so with a few quick taps. Turn your ordinary, everyday photos into beautiful works of art totally free.
Lightroom: This is an app that is in high competition with Photoshop among professional photographers. However, many visual storytellers—myself included—find Lightroom less overwhelming than Photoshop. And the one big benefit it has over Photoshop is that you don’t have to be concerned about layers or losing work—all changes are automatically saved to your catalog. Lightroom is a great app for a novice photographer ready to expand their skill set because it includes all the basics—cropping, brightening, sharpening—and has a few extra goodies like teeth whitening, red-eye reduction and spot removal.
VSCO: This is a fun app to use because it has its own community in which you can share your photos. There is nothing better as a photographer than having the opportunity to study someone else’s work—you may even gain some new ideas or tricks from doing so. And that’s the #1 reason I would recommend using this paid app. It’s not the most user-friendly, though. Once you’ve played with it a while and know your way around the image feed, how to import photos from your own camera, and how to change over to editing mode, things get easier. Another thing I love about VSCO are the filters—there are so many! And this amazing app even lets you adjust the intensity of your filter, which can make a huge difference to your finished product.
There are a lot of photo editing apps that exist out there. But if you’re new to photography I’d suggest starting with what you already have on your phone or computer. And realize that even the smallest improvements can make your photos look better! Once you’ve conquered the free apps available to you, move up to something with more features—usually a paid app.