Hi guys! TODAY I wanted to share a few of my favorite photo editing tools.

I know its not exactly in my southern lifestyle or home decor wheel house, but as a digital media/studio art major, I love giving my photos a cohesive "feel" through a couple different apps. I talked about three of my favorite apps, one of my favorite photographers, and shared some Before & After examples of photos edited with different apps or presets. All of these pictures are from my trip to New Brunswick & Nova Scotia two years ago, and I'm dreaming of returning to this gorgeous place! 

Click on the images to have them show up full-sized/not-cropped! 

Creating consistent visual content

One of the biggest challenges with Instagram, and one of the most important rules I try to implement. Is to think of your first 9 instagram squares as basically your "elevator pitch," since they make up the first impressions for anyone that views your account. A while ago, I set down and thought of the top things that I think LBS is about, and came up with a pretty loose editorial "template" for the pictures I post. If you're a fashion blogger, maybe it's "work outfits," "casual outfits," "loungewear/date night/girls night out." Or for mom bloggers, it could be "motherhood," "food," "clothing/travel/DIY idea." For me, its something like "home: closeup," "home: wider view," "recipe/travel/outfit." My audience tends to like the home pictures more than the recipe/travel/outfit posts, so I try to keep the majority of my top 9 posts to be home related, with two other themed posts so I can switch it up sometimes. 

My favorite Photo-Editing Tools

VSCO is the app that I use most often on my phone, and its one that I've used for several years now. I love the different presets and how big of an effect they can have on the aesthetic of an image. Thats why, when I started making the jump to using LightRoom, I started searching for ways to use LR to edit my images in a similar color palette as my favorite VSCO preset, and I found one of my latest favorite photographers in the process (I'll talk about him at the bottom!) 

VSCO

I've been using VSCO for years to add color/tint filters to my photos. I've narrowed it down to two favorites that I use most often. VSCO, or the Visual Supply Co, lets you try out so many different filters, from color changes to B&W, and you can purchase more if you like. For a long time I just used the free ones, but last year I purchased one of the 99 cent packages for some new colors. 

You can create an account, edit your photos, and share them to a journal. The journal is a fun way to look 

LightRoom

Lightroom is actually not an app that i felt comfortable with up until the last year or so, but now I use it probably 90% of the time when I have access to a laptop. Which brings me to my first brag on LR. It takes up less space than Photoshop, and its a little less pricey. Honestly, I work in both with the Adobe Photography bundle, but if i had to pick one to remove from my computer to save space.. I'd have to make some serious lists. Because I like Photoshop, I really do, but I feel like most of what I want to do to pictures I can do through LR, except for the graphics for the blog like I used here. 

While I really like using pre-created presets, I always end up going in and using the easy slider controls to adjust some of the settings individually, just to make sure that all the temperature, brightness, contrast, saturation, and sharpness are exactly where I want them to be. 

I love how working in LightRoom uses NON DESTRUCTIVE editing while you work on your images, no damage to originals, and you don't have to work about accidentally saving over an original. So, if in a few years, I want to go back to the original and edit it using completely different settings, I can do that no matter how long its been since i edited the photo. 

Shout out to one of my favorite Photographers

Nate Photographic! Nate was one of the first people I found that really helped me start to appreciate Lightroom. He has some AMAZING presets available, both free ones and purchase-able ones, and I love the different feels they can give to my photos. I found Nate Photographic while looking around the internet for instructions on how to use lightroom to make my pictures look like they did through VSCO so that all my photos could look consistent across the platforms. At which point I found his website and his 10 Free Lightroom Presets Inspired by VSCO! Before I started using these presets, if I wanted a photo to look like something out of VSCO, I had to convert all my camera images to tiny jpegs for my phone, send them to myself, download them on the phone, upload them onto VSCO, and then edit them before sending them back to myself. LOTS of image quality damage. Plus, this is SO MUCH FASTER. I can get the pictures from my camera, upload them into LR, edit them, export them, and then add them straight to the blog! (or to my phone to post on Instagram!)

Here are a few examples of photo's I've edited with presets made by Nate! he just sent out some new free presets, and I'm kind of obsessed with these black and white options, so i used two of those, and two from the other presets of his that I use!