Finally the post that you’ve all been waiting for. I have to say that this is probably THE most asked question that I ever get: “how do you edit your Instagram photos” or “what filters and/or apps do you use on your Instagram photos”. Today I’m here to spill the beans and to show you exactly how I get my images to look the way that they do. But first, some FAQs – because it’s necessary to get these questions out of the way.

What do you use to take your photos?

The majority of my photos are taken with a DSLR. I shoot with a Nikon D600, and my most used lens is the 50mm f/1.8. There might be the odd iPhone photo here and there, but almost 99% of the time, all of the images that I post were shot with my camera. That being said, you don’t have to use a fancy camera in order to get nice photos. Remember, it’s not the camera that makes the photographer.

What filters and apps do you use?

I exclusively use Photoshop to edit all of my photos, and I also don’t use filters. Contrary to many other people, I don’t use VSCO. I never have and I have no plans to. Not because I don’t like the app, but mainly because I’ve used Photoshop to edit my photos for the past 10 years, so why fix what’s not broken? That being said, I know that not everyone has access to Photoshop, and that there are many apps out there with similar capabilities, so I’ll also show side by side comparisons as to how you can replicate my editing flow through some apps as well. The 2 apps that I used to replicate my Photoshop process are Aviary and Snapseed.

*Note: in each step, ‘Original’ denotes the very last step that was applied prior to the current step.

My Editing Flow

Crop and Rotate

The very first thing that I do is figure out how I want to crop the image and then resize it. I’m careful to follow the rule of thirds (I’ll share more about that another day), and try to crop out parts of the background that don’t flow into the image properly. I also changed up the perspective a little bit to ensure that the windows were straightened.

White Balance

The next thing that I do whenever I edit any photo is to correct the white balance. I love my whites to be true whites and to not have any strange yellow/blue tones, so white balance is such a big must. When editing in Photoshop, I do my first round of edits through editing in Photo Raw, so I use the White Balance tool to recalibrate the colours in my photo. In Aviary, I brought up the warmth level a little since the photo looked a little bit too cool.

Brighten

I like to shoot my photos a little bit darker than the final result, because sometimes over exposing on your camera can cause white blow-outs, which can’t be recovered in the editing process. When I take photos that are a little bit darker, I’m able to brighten them yet still retain all of the details that I wanted to be shown in the photo.

Darken the Shadows

I love, love, love a highly contrasted image, so darkening up the shadows a bit is something that is always done. Be careful not to make the black parts of your images too dark, or once again you’ll lose details in those areas of the photo.

Desaturate the Brights, and Reduce the Oranges/Yellows

As you’re probably aware of by now, my images tend to be quite desaturated. This is done manually by decreasing the vibrancy of my photo. As opposed to destaurating the photo (which can result in a grey picture), I bring down the vibrancy so that there is still colour, but not as bright and in your face.

Clean Up the Background

Everyone is guilty of a little bit of photoshopping – I, for one, like my photos to have nice and clean backgrounds, but that isn’t always the case when shooting. This is where Photoshop comes in handy. I like to use the Spot Healing Brush Tool and the Clone Stamping Tool to remove any garbage, leaves, strange foreign objects until I’m happy with the way that the background looks. Careful not to go crazy with the adjustments as the image can quickly look over shopp’d. When it comes to cleaning up the background in an App, I switch over to Snapseed t use the Healing Tool and it does a decent job.

Resize, Save, Send and Post

Resizing is also an important component to editing as Instagram’s algorithm will compress your file if it’s too large in order for it to be compatible with their platform. I always resize down my photos to 1500 x 1500 pixels once I’ve cropped it into the square (or rectangle – 4:5, that I want it to be).

I then save it at the highest resolution possible in .JPEG format and e-mail myself a copy so that I can post it. The below image doesn’t represent this step since it’s difficult to show the difference between one size to another so I decided to show you the very original image compared to the final edits.

As you can see, there isn’t much of a major difference, but the slight changes that I applied really help to improve the image.

And that’s basically it! Hopefully that helped to answer all of your questions. As always, leave me a comment or shoot me an e-mail if there was something that I didn’t cover and the question is burning you up inside. Best of luck with your photo editing, and I can’t wait to see all of your pictures!