Best Editing Apps of 2018

There are dozens of photo editing apps to choose from to make your images look Instagram-perfect - here's a look at some of the best.

1. VSCO

A hugely popular photo editing app amongst Instagram users, VSCO is more than just photo editing, it offers a community for photographers to connect and create. Simply searching the Hashtag #VSCO on Instagram will reveal the huge community of photographers and casual users that use VSCO every day, a testament to the app’s popularity. The one click filters make it easy to get that popular film look and to customize the filters to make them your own. There are in app purchases involved, but they are worth it.

2. Adobe Lightroom

The app comes stacked with tons of tools giving you the ability to change almost every single detail in an image, and of course preset filters are readily available. The app also houses a built in camera, with a pro mode that gives you control over settings such as Shutter Speed, White Balance and ISO. One of the unique features of Adobe Photoshop Lightroom is the Creative Cloud Photography plan, essentially a monthly subscription with Adobe, providing benefits such as; access your media anywhere, sync photo edits across all devices, Photoshop CC and much more. The sliders make the editing process quick and easy. Lightroom also gives you the option to copy and paste settings from one photo to another. This allows you to create a consistent look for your photos. Plus you can store the photos from your camera/desktop, which makes the photo quality stay superb during the editing -> posting process.

You now have three options when buying Lightroom. The Lightroom CC plan runs $9.99 per month and includes that 1TB of online storage, but with that plan you don't get Photoshop CC$9.99 at Adobe. The Photography plan, also $9.99 per month, gets you both Lightroom CC and Photoshop CC, along with Lightroom Classic, but it only includes 20GB of cloud storage. It costs an additional $10 per month to get that package with 1TB of storage. And finally, of course, you get all three programs with a full, $49.99-per-month Creative Cloud subscription, though that only comes with 100GB of cloud storage (upgradeable to 1TB for an additional $9.99 per month).

3. Snapseed

Featuring dozens of tools to modify and edit your images, with all the standard adjustable settings from brightness to highlights. Snapseed also has advanced brush tools to precisely adjust specific areas of your photographs. Perhaps you want to saturate those red sneakers or sharpen the details in the skyscrapers, Snapseed can do it. You can truly transform your photographs and give them a professional finish. Also available is a wide array of filters, lens blur, HDR and healing settings.

4. Retouch

The Retouch app is great for removing unwanted objects or imperfections. You can either clone parts of the image or let the app do its magic by painting the area you want to remove, et voila, Retouch will fix it for you.

5. A Color Story

It's a free to download and you can then choose in app which filter packs or effects packs you'd like to purchase within a range of .99¢ to $1.99 OR (which is the option I chose) you can purchase all current packs for a limited time for just $7.99! If you do a large portion of your daily editing on your iPhone, on the go, in between meetings, work, etc. like I do then the cost of $7.99 for a well rounded and fresh photo editing app is a no brainer.