One of the most frequently asked questions I get is “what filter and/or photo apps do you use” for instagram. I don’t have one specific recipe as every photo is different but I thought I’d put together a little tutorial with examples and give you my go to filters and apps. And who knows, maybe you can pick up a little nugget of a trick to apply to your own photos. Here we go…

First I should say… all of my instagrams are iPhone photos and edited on the iPhone. The only exception is when I pull an image from a blog post to announce that there is new content on the blog, which I label with either the photographer (if it isn’t by me) or a “link in profile”.

Secondly, some photos just take a little bit of editing and some I end up spending way too much time on. Here is what I did for this first photo. On the left is straight out of the camera, and on the right is the photo I posted. I usually start with pulling the photo into VSCOcam. In there I choose a filter, for this one I used M5 (other favorites are C3, F1, and G3) and usually I dial it back a bit from the full +12. If you are scratching your head right now I can explain. When in VSCO, select a filter and that automatically puts it on full power, now tap the same filter again and there is the scale from +1 to +12, now you can play with how much of the filter you want to be on the photo.

Once I am happy with the filter choice I save it and then open it in Afterlight. I like the control that Afterlight has on brightness, contrast, and sharpening so I do all that there. I also use afterlight to create the white border around mine to keep them landscape or portrait. You can do this by hitting the bottom right button  that is a black circle inside of a white square. Once in that menu hit the icon that looks like two vertical bars and voila.

For this photo, I skipped Afterlight and went right from VSCO to instagram (I posted this one as a square originally so didn’t use the white bars). I picked a filter, and then brightened and sharpened it right in Instagram. Done!

 Then there are some photos that need a little extra help. For this one I did my thing in VSCO, followed by Afterlight, then I wanted to get rid of a few of those brown pine needles so I pulled it into touchRetouch. This app is great for getting rid of little unwanted things in a photo. I used the lasso tool, circled the pine needles that I wanted out of there, hit the “play” triangle button and like magic, they disappeared.

Here is one more example where I used all three apps. Of course not all photos go through this entire process, many I use a little bit of a vsco filter and then bring it right into Instagram but I wanted to give you my full arsenal. So once again… here I used VSCO for the color (their filters are my fave), then brought it into Afterlight for brightness, contrast, sharpening, and the borders. Then I touchRetouched that little boat right out of there and THEN I posted it in instagram, for a semi-insta instagram. PHEW!

Happy iPhonography x sarah