How to edit iPhone Photos for Instagram (Outdoors Version!)

October 28, 2023

Looking for tips on how to edit iPhone photos for Instagram? For tips on editing your iPhone photos for color, light, and success on Instagram, read on!

How to edit iPhone Photos for Instagram:

Editing your outdoorsy iPhone photos for Instagram can be a daunting process, but it doesn’t have to be! Here are seven steps to get you editing your photos quickly and consistently for maximum success on Instagram:

1) Start by a taking a good photo

The easiest way to edit a great photo is to start with a great photo. Here are some quick tips for shooting great photos on an iPhone:

Start with a straight horizon:

One part of a great photo is making sure the horizon line is straight! If you’re shooting the ocean, this means that the line where the sea meets the sky is straight. To help with this turn on gridlines on your photos; this can be done in iPhone settings.

Properly expose your photos! If the sky looks white on your screen, tap on the sky to select the portion of the photo you would like in focus. This should help properly expose your photo.

Text on image reads:

Rule of thirds and leading lines:

Here you can see that the photo can be divided into thirds both length and width wise.

The kayak is in the center, bottom third, while either side of the slot canyon is in the left and right third. The patch of sky and trees is in the top, center third balancing the kayak in the bottom.

The slot canyon itself creates leading lines, or lines that create a natural path for the eye to follow into the photo.

Using the Rule of Thirds and Leading Lines to take beautiful photos for Instagram on any camera:

In order to use the rule of thirds to compose your photos, turn on gridlines!. The rule of thirds is a guideline for composing aesthetically pleasing photos.

Leading lines are the natural paths the eye follows through a photo. Often, leading lines are a hiking trail or river leading back into the scene, a road, or even lines like logs in a lake. Sometimes, leading lines can even be the edges of a kayak or a canoes gunwales.

Use people to convey scale:

using people to convey scale:

In this photo, you can see two small kayakers at the base of the waterfall.

The size of the kayakers compared to the size of the waterfall creates a sense of scale; we know the size of a human (or kayaker), and a small kayaker helps us contextualize the size of the waterfall.

You can use this in your photos by taking photos where people appear small to convey how large the landscape is.

One of the best ways to covey how beautiful a landscape is is showing an human interacting with that landscape! This works in two ways:

Firstly, adding a human or human object such as a kayak, backpack, canoe, or tent provides the viewer with a sense of scale. If the tent is small, then the mountain behind it must be huge!

Secondly, including humans or human-objects in your photos helps the viewer imagine themselves there. Including human objects is especially meaningful in outdoor photography, where human objects may not naturally exist. Viewers love to see a campfire cooking delicious food in the outdoors, a cozy tent set up, or a hiker happy on top of a mountain because they can imagine themselves having fun in the outdoors as well.

When done well, including human elements in outdoor photography can help make the outdoors a less-intimidating space for viewers.

2) Crop if needed

Once you’ve taken a photo you are happy with, the next step in editing your iPhone photo is cropping the photo. This can mean straightening your horizon line if it is not already straight, or resizing the photo so that your subject is centered. Cropping your photo only takes a few seconds!

Before further editing, download the free Lightroom mobile app for your phone! This is a handy editing app is the app most photographers on Instagram use to edit their photos. Lightroom mobile is totally free as an app, and a very powerful photo editing tool.

3) Apply a preset as an editing base: the easiest way to edit iPhone photos for Instagram

One of the best ways to edit photos for Instagram is to use photo presets, or photo filters. Photo presets can more than half your time editing photos, and are a great way to create a consistent look to your Instagram and social media. Some presets can even be used on videos.

Using Presets:

Presets, or photo filters, a great way to cut editing time and create a cohesive feel to your photo collection.

On the top left, the iPhone photo is edited with preset “Sunny Ocean”. On the bottom left, the preset is edited with preset “Dark Gold Summer”. (Both linked below).

Presets are a great place to start your photo editing process and are excellent for editing a lot of photos quickly to look similarly. Even after years of outdoor photography experience, I still use presets to begin my editing process. I actually didn’t use presets for my first few years, and I wish I had started using them sooner, because they save a lot of time.

You can make your own presets by saving a set of edits to use repeatedly, or you can download presets from your favorite creators.

I use about 15 different presets designed for a variety of lighting situations and seasons. The presets I use are compatible with both photo and video. I use them both for quick edits on iPhone photos and videos, and as a base to build off for many of my DSLR Raw files. You can download my photo presets here to edit your outdoor photos in just a few clicks.

While these presets are designed specifically for editing phone photos, they are also compatible with photos shot on DSLR camera, and I use these presets to edit most of my Instagram Reels as well.

4) Edit the lighting

After applying the preset that best matches the desired mood of your photo, it’s time to edit the lighting.

Text reads: Editing Light When editing light, you get to decide if you want your photo to be lighter, or darker. Here, I applied the preset “soft sunset” to an iPhone photo of me canoeing the Jordan River. After applying the preset, I decided I wanted the photo lighter and less dark. I increased the exposure slightly. Later, I would go on to make selective edits (see section six) to brighten the subject and the sky.

Edited with preset “Soft Sunset”

If you feel your photo is too dark, or underexposed, increase the exposure to lighten. If you feel your photo is too light, or overexposed, decrease the exposure to darken.

In the “light” tab in Lightroom mobile, you can also increase shadows, which will lighten areas in the shadows, or decrease highlights, which will darken areas in full sunlight. I recommend using these tools cautiously! One of the biggest photo editing mistakes I see on Instagram is over-edited photos. Lightening shadows too much while darkening brightness is an easy way to make your photo look over edited and unnatural.

5) Edit for Color

Editing for color is one of the easiest ways to make your outdoor photos stand out on Instagram! The most common way to do this is color grading. The best way to learn color grading is to experiment with what colors and styles you like. Many presets will also have color grading built in.

Editing Colors:

When editing color, you can both edit in the color mixer tool, and in color grading.

To begin editing this RAW file from Canon DSLR, I applied the preset “Vintage”. From here, I increased the exposure slightly, as I like to shoot my photos underexposed. After, I went into the Color Grading tool, and adjusted the shadows and midtones to be very slightly orange, and the highlights to be very slightly sky blue.

With color grading, a little adjustment goes a really long way.

Edited with preset “Vintage”

One color edit I always make in photos with blue sky is to decrease the luminance on the blues! This darkens the sky without increasing the saturation— sometimes I even decrease the saturation slightly after decreasing luminance.

When it comes to photo editing, less is more. While it can be very tempting to increase the blues in the sky significantly, or turn up the saturation a lot, or even pull the shadows all the way, more often than not this creates an “over-processed” or over-edited look to your photos. Plenty of over-processed photos still do well on Instagram. However, habitually over processing photos can make it very difficult to transition to paid photography gigs in the future, and many viewers will probably flag your photo consciously or subconsciously as unnatural looking.

6) Add selective edits (select subject)

One of the best things you can do to edit your photos for Instagram is use the masking tool to select the subject of your photo. Selective edits allow you to edit important portions of your photo separately from the photo as a whole.

Selective edits and how to color grade for Instagram:

One of the most powerful photo editing tools to master is using selective edits via the masking tool to edit just a section of your photo at a time.

In addition to color grading to make the photo more blue and pink, this photo was also edited selectively.

In masking, the “select subject” tool was used to edit the hiker and the log separately from the rest of the photo with increased contrast and sharpness compared to the mountain lake scene behind them.

Common selective edits include editing the Subject of the photo to draw the eye in, emphasizing leading lines, editing the sky of a photo separately, or editing water to cut glare.

7) Edit for overall mood

The single best thing you can do when editing your outdoorsy photos for Instagram is take a break! Close the app, and walk away from your photo edits for a few hours, or even a day or two. Come back to your photos with fresh eyes later.

When you come back to the photo with fresh eyes, you can decide more objectively if you like your edits or not. With some photos, I’ve returned to them repeatedly days, months, or even years later to re-edit to change the mood.

Editing photos for mood:
After applying a preset, editing for light, color, and selective edits, close the Lightroom app for a little while!

Come back at least an hour or two later. Do you still like how your photo looks? Does it now look too bright, or too saturated? Make final adjustments to edit your photo for mood.

This photo was one of the first photos I took on my first DSLR camera, and I didn’t get an edit I was happy with until this year. With color grading to make it pinker and selective edits, and revisiting many times to edit for mood, I finally got an image I liked.

Creating mood in a photo comes down to a combination of many factors, including light, color, and various effects. In general, brighter photos with more light and color in them associate with a happy and positive mood. Meanwhile, darker toned photos with more muted colors associate with a heavier mood. Neither is better or worse, but mood in general is great to keep in mind while editing your photos, especially when working to edit a group of photos as a set.

Easy edits you can make for moody Instagram photos:

One of my favorite easy edits to make a moody photo is decreasing the exposure while increasing the grain (found in the “effects” tab). This darkens the overall photo and increased grain can make a photo look older and reminiscent of film photos. Personally, I really love this edits for rainy day or cabin photos because it creates such a cozy, intimate mood. These edits also work especially well in photos with low light and lots of natural yellow and green tones (think: cabin in the woods).

For the photos below, preset “Vintage” was used as a starting point

Above, you can see some of these basic edits I’ve made for a darker, more intimate mood.

On the other hand, another common edit I make for mood is increasing the exposure slightly, adding a light source using the selective edits tool, and color grading to bring out pink, indigo, and/or teal tones. In lieu of selecting the subject, I’ve also found that selecting the foreground and increasing the contrast and texture can add depth to an image (see below left). This edit set works especially well for photos with lots of teal tones, winter photos, or sunrise and sunset photos.

Above, you can see how basic edits such as color grading and selectively lightening the subject create a mood among three photos taken at different times and locations. These photos all began with presets in the Winter Light preset package, which color grades for pink, blue and purple tones and creates a dreamy cool toned effect.

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Streamline your photo editing process by downloading the Winter Light Preset Pack for 5 presets compatible with photo and video designed to enhance photos shot on iPhones and DSLR Cameras alike:

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