My Favorite User Friendly Mobile Apps for Editing Photos

Written By Alyssa Ficcaglia

High quality, good looking product photos are an essential part of your businesses success. Your photos can be that one thing that either creates a sale for you or turns potential clients away. The creative marketplace is extremely saturated and with hundreds, possibly thousands, of other shops out there making the same exact thing as you, standing out in the sea of product listings is important. There is a common misconception that in order to have great looking photos you need to have top notch photography equipment, but that just isn’t true. You can create great quality looking photos with your smartphone camera and an app. For this blog post I wanted to share a few of my go to photo editing apps that I use/used to edit all my product photos. All my photos are taken using my iPhone camera and then edited using one or more of the apps listed below. In a future post I will share some tips on lighting and staging. 

On this list, you will find that Photoshop is not listed. I personally don’t know how to use Photoshop nor do I feel like paying for the software just yet. It is however something I would like to learn and use in the future when it makes more sense for our business.

My Favorite Photo Editing Apps

1. INSTAGRAM

Instagram is the perfect photo editing app for beginners. Instagram is free to use and is most likely where you will end up posting all your product photos anyway. You can use their preset filters, but personally I never really liked the look for them. Instagram does give you the option to edit beyond just using filters. The three main things you want to focus on are highlight, shadow, and brightness. You want your products photos to be bright and vibrant so they stand out. Practice using those three toggles in the Instagram photo editing section and I guarantee you will start to notice a difference in how your product photos look. Instagram is a great start, but it doesn’t offer one thing that in my opinion is really important for protecting your business. That is where the next app comes into play.

2.  SNAPSEED

Snapseed is one of my absolute favorite photo editing apps to use. I continue to use it to this day. You can edit the shadows, highlights, and brightness in this app just like how you can in Instagram but Snapseed offers a few other features that are super helpful. Of the other features the most important is the ability to add watermarks to your photos. A watermark is basically your business name or logo embedded into the photo. You will see in all of my product photos a tiny line that reads “@littlefelladesignco”. I do this for protection. Sadly there are people out there who will steal your images and claim them as their own. By adding a watermark with your name, you are making it clear to everyone that you are the owner of that photo. Snapseed also gives you the ability to remove blemishes in a photo,  for example if you realize there is a mark on the wall or floor in the background of your image just use the “healing” tool to erase it.. Snapseed is free to use and user friendly.

3.  LIGHTROOM

Last but not least, Lightroom. Lightroom is part of the Adobe Suite, but is free to download and doesn’t require you to have an Adobe Subscription. However, while it is free to download and there are free editing features on it similar to Snapseed, it’s most impressive feature is the ability to install presets. If you ever wonder how people get their Instagram feed photos to all look exactly the same aesthetically, it’s presets. Presets are basically “pre-set” edits that you install to Lightroom and with a few clicks they automatically edit your photos for you. Presets are not free and range in price from as little as $5 for a bundle to $95 or higher. The more you pay they better the presets are, but even the $5 bundles look amazing. You can purchase presets on Etsy or from your favorite influencers usually. Lightroom has saved me so much time and energy on editing photos. I just upload to Lightroom, click the preset I want, and boom it’s done. It’s as close to professional photo editing as you can get and keeps your feed looking cohesive.

My current photo editing process involves using Lightroom to edit the photos, and then importing them into Snapseed to add my watermark. It is a two step process, but gives me the best end result. 

What photo editing apps do you use? Let me know in the comments if you try any of the apps I listed above and how they worked for you.