For the past 12 years I’ve been an Adobe lover. Designing projects from logos and brand assets, to editing photos and laying out magazines. I honestly never thought I’d branch out of the adobe suite.
Enter becoming a solopreneur!
You don’t need some big fancy creative cloud subscription to accomplish your goals showing up on social. From editing photos, to designing your logo and even lead magnets, these are a few of my go-to favorite apps that are user friendly, creatively beautiful and absolute must haves on my phone (oh and totally free too!).
For beautiful filters and lighting adjustment: Lightroom
Ok, so yes, this is an Adobe product… hey I didn’t say I don’t still love them, but this post is about easy phone apps that I can’t live without.
Save your own preset filters!! Access quick “on brand” filters to make photos look beautiful and consistent. While also cutting the editing time down by half.
Also great for:
– Editing exposure, contrast and light levels
– Detail, noise reduction and grain effects
For photo editing: Snapseed
Haaaaaaaaaaaa. Yes that is me singing like an angel with glowing sun beem a-coming down.
Honestly, I tried having photoshop on my phone. I’m so used to it as an application it wasn’t hard to adapt to a mobile version. But snapseed is just so much more user friendly, easy to find exactly what tools you want and to select only certain areas to modify. Think: if two people take a selfie and the second person is a bit shadowed behind the first… easy fix to just lighten that one area and modify the rest of the photo as a whole.
Just some of my favorite Snapseed tools:
– Spot selection tools
– Portrait mode
– Edit Exposure, contrasts and light levels
– General filters and styles
– Spot healing for blimishes or cleaning up a dirty lense
– Detail, noise reduction, and grain effects
Here you can see a slight difference in lighting. I brightened the shadow on my face next to my hairline on the left (also this brightened my eyes a bit). While I darkened my hair towards the ends.
For story video editing: InShot
This is my absolute fav for editing videos on the go. You can change the canvas size or you can trim, cut, or split videos.
But here’s the fun part. You can add you own style of captions, stickers and music. Similar to Instagram or Facebook stories, but you can set text or graphics to be “turned on” for only selected parts of the video.
This means a little extra work when it comes to creating Storia, but if you are running a business, blog, or working to be an influencer this app is non negotiable for taking your stories up a level to meet your niche audience wherever they are while they are tapping into your social media profiles.
For designing pins, lead magnets, and graphics: Canva
Canva is a great tool for designing, there are tons of templates to choose from for almost any platform or occasion. And if you’re more advanced, it’s completely easy to design things the way you want them.
There is also a paid version that is fun too. You get extra fonts and can download files with a transparent background (perfect for designing your own on brand gifs!) and have to a of extra elements and features.
Personally, I find I didn’t need it for what I typically work on these days, but the option for transparent exporting is def worth checking out.
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