5 apps to give your Instagrams professional gloss
Filters are fine, but take your Instagram posts to the next level with these editing apps.
If you want to become a world-famous Instagram photographer, or at least boost your follower and like counts, I’m going to let you in on a little secret. There are five highly effective habits of popular Instagram users, and none of them has to do with Instagram. (well…Instagram is produces a few of them.)
Photographers, video personalities, fashion bloggers, and famous foodies use these five free apps to take their Instagrams to the next level, and you’d never even know it.
Instagram’s own filters go a long way toward making a boring cake richer than they do in person, and the app is constantly updated with fresh options.
Instead of overloading you with options,which the popular photo- and video-sharing app doesn’t want to , is why its most game-changing features have been spun off as separate apps (we’ll get to those in a minute).
But third-party apps have been making other users’ photos look like pages from a magazines — and videos look like film clips — for quite some time. Here are the five best ways to make your Instagrams stand out from the norm.
All of these apps make sharing photos to Instagram super simple :)
VSCO Cam
Let’s get this out of the way: VSCO Cam is the app that professionals prefer. VSCO makes top-notch photo-editing software, and its app brings that level of gloss to your amateur iPhone and Android shots. Talk to any serious Instagrammer and you will see this app in their arsenal.
VSCO Cam can make almost any shot look a lot better.
Like Instagram, VSCO Cam offers filters and strengthening sliders for everything from saturation to warmth. But (sorry, Instagram) VSCO Cam’s presets are above and beyond Kelvin and Nashville — plus, you can buy themed filter packs to round out your options. The collections are artistic instead of cheesy: See “Analog Classic” or “Faded & Moody.” If you want your photos to look ripped straight out of a back issue of National Geographic (or Vogue), VSCO Cam is your best bet.
Whitagram
To have your images having a cinematic feel to it, you need Whitagram. The app adds a white letterbox to your landscape and portrait photos. It sounds almost stupidly simple, but if you’ve ever watched a classic movie and appreciated the detail you see in frames with proper ratios, you know how much better letterboxed images can look.
Letterboxing your photos and video aside, Whitagram lets you add bits of text and art too.
Whitagram makes your photo square by filling in the background with white, so you don’t lose a thing, which isn’t crucial now that Instagram allows rectangular photos, but it still makes your images a little grander.
Whitagram: Basic service, but a necessary one.
Layout
After seeing the popularity of apps like Pic Stitch, which let you turn several images into a collage, Instagram released its own version called Layout.
Layout does cool things other collage apps can’t, like mirror effect that puts mountains in the sky (image above).
Layout is definitely glossier than its rivals, with unique features like Faces which immediately pulls up all your photos with people in them. Putting up to nine photos is a breeze with Layout’s handles, which let you push and pull to adjust photos until they’re just the right size. You can also shoot photos within the app for super quick collage creation.
Hyperlapse
Hyperlapse is a stand-alone app on iOS for creating time-lapsed videos by Instagram. You might be already experimenting with time-lapsed videos with other tools, and the iOS camera offers a similar feature, but Hyperlapse makes it easy to shoot, filter, and share those clips quickly.
Hyperlapse is great for things like crowds, street scenes, and sunrises. Plus you never know what kind of effects you can get out of it until you experiment and toy with it.
You might not use the app very often, but it churns out great videos for specific purposes. For instance, if you’re filming crowds of people moving, sunrises and sunsets, or other scenes that change over time, Hyperlapse is a great way to condense that into Instagram’s 15-second limitation.
Boomerang
It’s not a photo. It’s not a gif. It’s a Boomerang.
Boomerang lets you shoot a burst of 10 photos from your front-facing or rear camera, then turns the photo burst into a smooth video that loops back and forth. It creates a cool effect when you’re capturing movement - injecting the little extra oomph to what would otherwise be a plain boring video.
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If you have cool photo editing apps you would like others to know, let us know and we will share it with everyone we know :)
