How to Edit Instagram Photos on Your Phone

Decide your look before you edit

Consistency comes from deciding once, not from editing well every time. Choose a direction, such as warm and bright, cool and moody, or faded and filmic, and stick to it for a month.

The five-step routine

Run every photo through the same order. Fixing geometry before colour and colour before texture saves you from redoing work.

• Crop and straighten
• Exposure and white balance
• Apply your preset
• Adjust to taste (exposure 0.5, temp 200K)
• Export at full resolution

Export settings that matter

Export at the largest size available and let Instagram compress once. Re-saving a photo that has already been compressed is what creates blocky skies.

Tip. Never screenshot an edit to post it. You lose about half the data.

Check the grid, not the photo

Open your profile and look at the nine most recent posts together. Individual photos can be great and still make a messy grid, and that is a sequencing problem, not an editing one.