Edit Instagram food photos - best apps - Snapseed, VSCO, Afterlight

I’m a hungry girl, in a filtered world. That’s how the song goes…right? Today I’m sharing my favorite apps for how I edit Instagram food photos.

Every so often I switch up how I edit my Instagram photos to get that certain curated feed lewk, but it’s typically always a variation of the method I’m about to show you below.

Best apps to edit Instagram food photos

First of all, the camera I use for about 75% of my photos is a Canon EOS Rebel SL1. I got it 6 or 7 years ago and still love it! It’s on the smaller side for a DSLR, but when I’m on-the-go I usually just use my iPhone X for photos.

Snapseed

The first app I use to edit my photos is Snapseed. I use this for basic editing. Typically what I do is:

tune image: increase brightness, increase contrast, decrease saturation
details: increase sharpness and structure
selective: increase brightness + decrease structure in specific areas
healing: remove crumbs, etc.

VSCO

Next I take the image edited in Snapseed and head over to old faithful – VSCO. My favorite preset right now is 06, which I adjust down to a 7-8 strength.

Afterlight

Then I use Afterlight for some final touches. I recently discovered and love the clarify tool, and then I add a little bit of the dust filter to satisfy my artsy fartsy side. Sometimes I also decrease the saturation (full and/or selective) a bit more in Afterlight.

(It’s kind of funny how each app does these edits differently! i.e. I don’t like how VSCO adjusts exposure/saturation at all, so I only use that for the presets.)

Every so often I’ll also add a couple of tweak edits in the Instagram app itself – usually a little bump in brightness or contrast to match my feed.

It may seem like a lot, but I’ve got it down to so much of a habit it usually takes me less than 2-3 minutes. As you can see the differences aren’t *huge,* but when all of the photos are together it really does lend to a nice curated, cohesive feed.