A question I commonly get asked is: “How do you edit your pictures?” A lot of people also ask what type of camera I use. For the past eight months, I’ve been doing the same things to my photos on Instagram for the most part. I’ve been using the same editing for the past eight months, and like I previously mentioned in my last blog post, my engagement has gone way up. I have an iPhone 7 Plus and that’s pretty much all I use now to take my pictures. I don’t remember the last time I used my Canon EOS Rebel T5 DSLR camera. Probably in this photo (here), posted March 15, 2017. Now I only use my iPhone and only use editing apps I have on my phone. For editing I use Snapseed, VSCO and sometimes Facetune. I only use Facetune for the “patch” feature to edit out things like trash on the ground or around me, and to edit out little fuzzies or strings on my clothes too. I also use Facetune for the “whiten” feature to get my teeth back to their normal color after editing it. Speaking of editing my photos, let’s get to how I edit my Instagram photos finally.

I always start with Snapseed first. I first start off by adjusting the brightness. Most of the time I have to increase the brightness, because I like to take pictures in the shade so I don’t have weird shadows all over my face and body. Next, I increase the contrast on EVERY SINGLE PICTURE. I increase it a lot. Like 30-50 +. I then increase the highlights, warmth and ambiance just a little bit. I then go to the “portrait” feature on Snapseed and select “smooth 2.” I decrease the skin smoothing to about 30. If I’m not wearing sunnies, I’ll increase the eye clarity so that you can actually see my eyes in the photo. That’s pretty much it for Snapseed. I export it and move on to VSCO.

I open VSCO and go to the editing tools right away. I do not use any filters on VSCO. I just use their editing tools. I increase the clarity on every picture because you can see the details better in the pictures. It also makes the photo look higher resolution. I then increase the temperature and skin tone to get my skin back to its normal color. That’s it for VSCO. I save the picture to my library and move on to the next step.

If I’m smiling in the photo, adjusting the warmth and temperature of the photo always turns my teeth yellow. This means I have to get my teeth back to their white color because no one wants yellow teeth. I open Facetune and use the “whiten” feature to get my teeth back to their white color. If I’m not smiling in the photo, I don’t have to take this extra step. If I have something on my clothes or if there is trash in the photo that makes the photo look ugly, I will use the “patch” feature on Facetune to eliminate it. I know there is a lot negativity surrounding Facetune, but if you use it just to eliminate things that make your photo ugly or get your coloring back to what it actually looks like in person, I don’t see any harm in using it. I think it is only bad when you alter your entire appearance and make yourself look like someone else. You still want to look like your true self in photos because if someone sees you in person, you want them to be able to recognize you. That’s the worst when you see someone in real life and they don’t look the same as they look on social media at all! That’s pretty much it for Facetune. After all that, I’m finally done.

After all the editing is done, I delete the other edits from my phone’s library and only keep the final edit. I then just simply post the photo on Instagram. It may seem like a lot of steps with a bunch of different apps, but once you have it down, it’s easy and fast. To me, it’s all worth it to get a good looking, good quality photo.

If you have any other questions, please let me know!

Thanks for reading,

Kortney