Best Photo Editing Apps

If you guys follow me on Instagram or read this post, you know I’m not a fan of the #nofilter phenom. It’s not that I feel like I need to hide behind a filter or that people should conceal their natural beauty (I only wear makeup on weekends, mostly out of laziness but still), but I do think we have an obligation to our followers to post the best possible photos. At least that’s what I like to see from the people I follow. There’s a time and a place for awkwardly angled candids, greasy foreheads and sloppy kegstand photos and that place is Facebook. Kidding, kind of. Although many of those do exist in the scary massive land of Kensie’s-untagged-FB-photos. But when it comes to Instagram, I like to pick my favorite of the literally dozens of photos I took and edited them to look exactly how I pictured. Sometimes I spend a stupid amount of time on just one small photo, but as far as I’m concerned it’s a little piece of art and a little reflection of who you are. There are so many cheap and powerful photo editing programs right at your fingertips and in case you haven’t been taking advantage of them, check out some of my favorites.

A Beautiful Mess
$0.99
The ladies of A Beautiful Mess can do no wrong in my eyes. They are the goddesses of the blogging world and their app is just one more smashing success to add to their repertoire of perfection. This app is like a super fun, easy and way less messy version of scrapbooking. There are a couple adjustable filters, but the real fun is in the borders, backgrounds, doodles and fonts. You can choose pre-made phrases or write your own text, add cute little hearts or mountains, add scrapbook-paper-like backgrounds and even create collages. I usually use this app for the doodles and text adding properties and save the other steps for the following apps.

Afterlight
$0.99
I recently discovered this app and I’m completely in love. Ever since downloading it I’ve edited every single photo in it before uploading it to Instagram. There are a ton of adjustable filters to choose from, but there are so many user-friendly photo editing options that I often don’t even need to go the route of a full-on filter. You can clarify, brighten, adjust the highlights, mid tones and shadow tones, add warmth, texture, crop, add film effects and choose all kinds of borders. I tend to go to the original borders and select the one that fits the whole photo (vertical or horizontal) into a square with white strips filling in for the extra space to see how it’ll look on Instagram. I choose this if the square will otherwise cut off more of the photo than I’m comfortable with. The great thing about this is you can still add a filter in this app without it affecting the shade of the white background unlike if you were to add a yellow-ish filter in Instagram. It’s the little things.

DipTic
$0.99
I downloaded this one a long time ago when I was fed up with the free collage apps throwing ads in my face and redirecting me when I was trying to get my collage on. Depending on how often you fuse your photos together, it may be completely unnecessary, but I like having the freedom to adjust the size of each section, the border width and zoom in and out on certain sections. If you like to get crazy with your collages, there are some pretty unique ones in here too including a ying-yang shape, waves, an alien face and all sorts of designs. You can also change the color of the background and add text.

Instagram
free
I’m sure you’ve heard of if not mastered the art of this one, but I figured I’d include it anyway since I use it pretty much every day. As I mentioned earlier, I don’t do a whole lot of editing in IG itself, rather I use it for the social aspect, but the newest update did add a lot more editing options if you want to skip the other steps. There are now far more options as far as intensity of filters and a few other basic photo editing steps such as brightness, contrast, warmth and vignette, but the only one I really use is the ’tilt shift.’ It focuses on the part of the picture you choose and makes the rest of the photo slightly blurry making it almost look like I know how to shoot a camera in manual (one of these days!).

How do you perfect your selfies? What are your favorite photo editing apps?