Mobile Photo Editing Apps - Tried & Tested

Gone are the days of unedited Instagram photographs. It's all about getting that near perfect shot and tweaking it 'til your fingers bleed. Okay, I exaggerate, but if you're looking for cleaner, brighter shots, it's essential that you have a good photo editing app to back you up. 
I'd definitely describe myself as a perfectionist when it comes to my photography. I don't consider myself to be in any way a pro or claim to have the most, 'perfect' shots but I know what I like and I'm constantly pushing myself to get the best images that I can. Nine times out of ten, the editing can make or break a shot and today I'm going to run through the editing apps that I have tried and tested.  

Photoshop Express

First up is my photo editing BFF. Seriously - I cannot live without this app! If you listen to one thing that I say today, it would be to go and download the Photoshop Express app. I absolutely love this app and use it every single time I want to edit a photograph for Instagram. It's so straightforward. 

Depending on the style of image that I'm going for, I typically adjust the exposure and highlights to brighten up the image and give those clean, white backgrounds. Then I'll sharpen up the image a touch and adjust the clarity. There's also a blemish removal tool which is great if you want to tidy up your image and a series of, 'looks' which work like filters to automatically prettify your pics. This app produces the best quality photo edits of all the apps I'm going to mention today and I honestly couldn't recommend it more to you guys!

Camera360

An old favourite of mine is the Camera360 App. Since downloading Photoshop Express, I haven't used it so much but we had a steady relationship for a solid 12 months. This app is all about the filters and I loved it for that reason. The app comes with a bunch of basic filters and you can download various other packs from the Effect Store. Most filter packs are free but some you need to be a member to download - just something to bear in mind. Each pack includes several, different filters so there's a great selection to choose from. My personal favourite packs are, 'Light Color' and 'Film Flex.'

This app has more features than Photoshop Express. There's a special, 'Selfie mode' that's great for capturing flawless selfies, plus it has all the usual controls to tweak your photo's exposure levels, brightness, contrast etc. A great all-rounder and definitely one to check out if you haven't used it before.

Afterlight

One editing app that I know is quite popular amongst bloggers is Afterlight. I downloaded this maybe around 12-18 months ago but I've never really warmed to it for some reason. It's quite similar to Camera360 in the sense that you have a variety of filter packs to choose from as well as the standard controls to adjust your images. 

My biggest gripe is that I don't find it the most user-friendly and none of the filters particularly stand out to me as ones that I would like to use for my personal needs. It does appear to have quite a bit of choice though and if you're looking for more, cool, retro style filters, this might be more up your street. 

Enlight

This next app I don't personally use, but I do have it downloaded on my iPhone and thought it was worth a mention. If you're more of a photography buff, you'll probably really like Enlight. It has a lot of complex elements to it. You can target specific areas of your image to touch up, distort and overlap images, apply filters and text, plus a whole host of other things. 

Enlight feels like it is geared towards more professional photographers. I'm not going to lie, I find this really difficult to work with and for me, it's too complex for my everyday needs; however if you have time to spend figuring this out, I reckon you can get some amazing results!

InstaSize

This next app is called InstaSize and it is what I have used to create most of the collages that you see in this post today. It's my go-to app for that purpose and pretty much any time you see me share a collage of any kind, this is what I will have used to create it. 

The main purpose of the app is to re-size larger images for Instagram, but I rarely use this feature as I've trained myself to use the square mode for any snaps I want to share on Instagram. The app's features also allow you to apply filters, stickers, borders and text to your images and adjust basic photo properties like exposure, contrast and saturation. The only bugbear I really have with this app is that it contains quite a few ads which can be really annoying!
All of these apps have been dowloaded on my iPhone and, as far as I'm aware, are also available on Android too. With the exception of Enlight, the rest of the apps are free, (to the best of my knowledge but do correct me if I'm wrong) with some paid-for content, i.e. extra filters, editing tools etc. 
Which apps do you use to edit your Instagram photos? Do you have any firm favourites and/or have you tried out any of the apps I've mentioned in this post? Leave me your thoughts guys and if you're not following me on Instagram, make sure you head on over to LifeinExcess_ right away! 
I hope you found this post useful. Much love...