How I Edit My Disney Parks Photos

Theresa
Apr 2, 2018
4 min read

Updated: Apr 24, 2018

You’ve taken your photos in the parks and you’re back in your hotel room for the night–or you're on your way home *sad tears* (which is usually when I choose to edit since I’m sad to leave and want to keep the magic alive as long as possible), how do you begin editing your photos? What apps should you use?

There are a lot of options out there, so I’m going to take you through how I edit my photos so you can hopefully get some ideas on how to edit yours. Or maybe you're just curious about my editing– whatever it is, I want to help answer any questions you may have. Everything I use to edit my photos is completely free, so you definitely don't have to worry about spending money on an editor like Photoshop if you want nice looking Instagrams. Let’s get started:

After I choose the photo I go to this website called befunky for my first edit, and then later finish off my edits in the app VSCO.

The first thing I do after uploading my photo is adjust the brightness. My aesthetic on Instagram and throughout this site is really bright photos, so adjusting all aspects of the exposure is key for me. I’ll up the brightness and adjust the highlights and shadows and add in some fill light to make it seem more full. I’ll then adjust the contrast according to how much I adjusted the brightness.

Next it’s onto the beautify tool. I really like this tool because it ups the vibrancy and makes everything look a lot more colorful. I usually adjust this to be at about 15-20 strength.

Now I go to the color tool and up the saturation and cool the photo down in temperature. I cool the photo off to keep a consistent aesthetic with all of my photos–plus, I'm personally not a fan of the warm photo aesthetic. A key part of editing is deciding whether you want a cool or warm aesthetic, so it all depends on your preference! After you choose, however, you'll want to stick with your decision to keep your feed consistent. As you can see, I don't cool my photos down enough for them to have a noticeable blue hue. I adjust the temperature just enough for the photo to be in a sort of neutral zone.

Depending on the natural lighting of your photo and how much you had to up the exposure you can adjust the saturation as needed. I don’t like my photos to be overly saturated, just enough to give them an extra punch.

After that I’ll go into the Miscellaneous section and play around with the tint. I’ll only use one color, an orangey yellow, and set it pretty low in how vibrant that overlay is. I like to do this especially if the photo is a little too cool. It adds in some extra warmth without creating noticeable tone shift like warming the photo in the temperature settings can do.

Lastly, I’ll go into color mix and add in some red and blue tones. Honestly, I don’t know if this makes much of a difference but I like to do it anyway. It’s kind of a habit at this point.

Now that all my editing in befunky is done I’ll upload it to the VSCO app on my phone using the web browser uploader. If you just want to edit your photos on your phone and not use befunky I highly recommend VSCO. They have a lot of editor options that are simple to use and I really like!

The first thing I’ll do in VSCO is add the C1/Chromatic filter onto my photo and adjust so it isn’t too strong.

Next I’ll up the brightness just a little bit more to make it even lighter. I've found that each editor ups the brightness in different ways, so using multiple editors to up the brightness is something I really like to do. Again, I use a light hand and only make adjustments that don’t look over the top, just enough to make a small difference since I already edited in befunky.

I adjust the contrast as well and make it a little heavier to give more definition

I also like to add in clarity and sharpness, especially if the subject of the photo is far away from me.

I’ll adjust shadows and highlights to brighten some areas of the photo that need extra help even after the exposure is adjusted.

Next I up the skin tone to put some life back into the subject’s face after all the adjusting of the temperature.

The very last thing I do is add in a light orange highlight to give the photo a slight glow.

If I'm uploading the photo to Instagram I'll do a little more editing with those tools, but it's usually very small adjustments in brightness and saturation. I'll also add on a very small amount of the Clarendon filter.