Top 10 'Flat-Photo-Fixing' Editing Tools to Use for Giving Your Smartphone Snaps Pro-Level Depth on Instagram - Goh Ling Yong
Ever had that sinking feeling? You frame the perfect shot on your smartphone. The scene is breathtaking, with layers of beautiful detail stretching into the distance. You tap the shutter, feeling like a pro. But when you look at the photo later, it’s… flat. The majestic mountain looks like a cardboard cutout, the vibrant street scene feels one-dimensional, and your portrait subject seems stuck to the background. What happened to all that glorious depth?
The truth is, a single camera lens can't capture the world the way our two eyes do. We perceive depth naturally, but a camera sensor captures light on a flat plane. This is why even the most expensive smartphone cameras can produce images that lack that "wow" factor. But here's the good news: you don’t need a fancy DSLR to fix it. The magic happens in the edit. By using the right tools, you can reclaim that lost dimension, guide the viewer's eye, and transform your flat smartphone snaps into professional-looking images that stop the scroll on Instagram.
Here on the Goh Ling Yong blog, we believe that great photography is accessible to everyone. It's about vision and the know-how to bring that vision to life. That's why we've compiled this list of the top 10 'flat-photo-fixing' editing tools. From industry-standard powerhouses to niche apps with magical features, these are your secret weapons for adding pro-level depth, drama, and dimension to your mobile photography.
1. Adobe Lightroom Mobile
The Industry Standard for a Reason
If you're serious about mobile editing, Lightroom Mobile is non-negotiable. While its presets are famous, its real power for creating depth lies in its selective adjustment tools. These tools let you "paint" with light and color on specific parts of your image, mimicking how light naturally behaves to create a sense of distance and focus.
The most powerful features for this are the Linear and Radial Gradients, and the Brush tool. Think of these as digital spotlights and shadows. You can drag a linear gradient from the bottom of a landscape shot and slightly decrease the exposure and clarity. This darkens the foreground, creating an anchor point that makes the rest of the scene feel further away. Similarly, a radial gradient placed over your subject can be used to subtly brighten them while slightly darkening the surrounding area, creating an instant "pop."
Pro Tip: Use the "Select Subject" or "Select Sky" AI masking features. With one tap, Lightroom isolates these elements. You can then, for example, slightly decrease the dehaze and clarity of the sky to create atmospheric perspective, making it recede into the background. This is a game-changer for landscape and travel photos that feel flat.
2. Snapseed
The Free Powerhouse for Precision
Don't let the "free" price tag fool you; Google's Snapseed is an incredibly robust editing suite. For tackling flat photos, its secret weapon has always been the "Selective" tool. Tap on a specific part of your photo—say, a flower petal or a person's face—and you can adjust Brightness, Contrast, Saturation, and Structure just for that tiny area. By brightening your subject and darkening the areas around it, you're performing a classic photography technique called "dodging and burning," which is fundamental for creating depth.
Another fantastic tool is the Brush. You can use the Dodge & Burn brush to literally paint light and shadow onto your image with your finger. Want to make the path in your forest photo lead the eye deeper into the woods? Gently brush a slightly higher exposure along the path. Want to make the edges of the frame darker to create a natural vignette? Brush a lower exposure around the perimeter.
Pro Tip: In the "Tune Image" tool, play with the "Ambiance" slider. It’s a magic wand for depth. It adds contrast to mid-tones and boosts saturation in a balanced way, often revealing hidden textures and separating layers in your image without making it look over-edited.
3. VSCO
More Than Just Moody Presets
VSCO built its reputation on beautiful, film-emulating presets, and a good color grade is actually a primary way to create depth. Different colors recede and advance visually; cooler tones (blues, greens) tend to recede, while warmer tones (reds, yellows) feel closer. A good VSCO preset often incorporates this color theory, subtly cooling the shadows and warming the highlights to create instant separation.
But dive deeper into VSCO's manual editing tools. The "Clarity" and "Sharpen" tools, when used sparingly, can add definition to your main subject, making it stand out against a softer background. The real gem, however, is the HSL (Hue, Saturation, Luminance) tool. Imagine a photo of a person in a yellow jacket standing in a forest. By going into the HSL tool, you can select the greens and slightly lower their Luminance (brightness), while selecting the yellows and slightly boosting their Luminance. This makes your subject leap forward from the background.
Pro Tip: After applying a preset, go to the "Split Tone" tool. Add a subtle cool blue or cyan to the shadows and a touch of warm yellow or orange to the highlights. This classic cinematic color contrast is one of the fastest ways to add a rich, dimensional feel to a flat image.
4. Focos
The Master of Artificial Depth of Field
This app feels like magic. Focos uses computational photography to add or adjust the "bokeh" (that blurry background effect) in your photos after you've taken them. It works best with photos taken in your phone's Portrait Mode, as it uses the embedded depth map, but its AI is surprisingly good at analyzing standard photos and creating its own depth map too.
This is the most direct way to create depth. You can tap on any object in your photo to set it as the focal point, and then use a slider to control the "aperture," making the background and foreground as blurry as you desire. Focos goes even further, allowing you to change the shape of the bokeh, add lens effects, and even view your photo in a 3D space to see the layers it has identified. It's perfect for turning a busy, flat-looking portrait or product shot into a clean, professional image where the subject is clearly the star.
Pro Tip: Use Focos not just for dramatic blur, but for subtle separation. Sometimes, just a tiny bit of background softness is all you need to make your subject stand out. Also, use its "Patch" tool to fix any AI errors where the blur might have incorrectly bled onto the edges of your subject.
5. Lens Distortions
Adding Layers with Light and Atmosphere
Sometimes, the best way to create depth is to add elements that create new layers. Lens Distortions is the master of this. This app provides a library of hyper-realistic overlays created from actual optical elements and atmospheric conditions. You can add subtle lens flares, fog, rain, or rays of light that instantly create a sense of foreground, mid-ground, and background.
Imagine a flat landscape photo. By adding a "Fog" or "Mist" layer and placing it behind a mountain range, you create atmospheric perspective, making the mountains feel miles away. Or, take a portrait and add a "Classic Light Hit" overlay coming from the side. This flare will appear to be in the foreground, between the viewer and the subject, adding an immediate layer of depth and a dreamy, cinematic quality.
Pro Tip: The key to using Lens Distortions is subtlety. After adding an effect, always dive into its settings. Lower the opacity, adjust the saturation, and use the built-in mask to erase parts of the effect so it integrates realistically with your photo's lighting. A great effect should be felt, not just seen.
6. Darkroom
Sculpting Depth with Curves and Color
Darkroom is a beautifully designed, powerful editor that many pros, including myself, use for its intuitive interface and pro-grade tools. Its strength in creating depth comes from its exceptional control over tone and color, primarily through the Curves tool. The Tone Curve might look intimidating, but it's the most powerful tool for controlling contrast.
By creating a gentle "S-curve" (lifting the top-right part of the line and pulling down the bottom-left part), you make your highlights brighter and your shadows darker. This increase in global contrast is a foundational step in making an image feel less flat. Darkroom’s Color Curves take it a step further, allowing you to create S-curves for the Red, Green, and Blue channels individually. This lets you perform sophisticated color grading to create that warm/cool color separation we talked about with VSCO.
Pro Tip: Use Darkroom's selective color sliders (HSL). Pick a distracting background color (like an overly bright green lawn) and selectively reduce its saturation and luminance. The background will visually recede, pushing your main subject forward. It’s like tidying up your photo with color.
7. Tezza
Texture and Grain for a Tactile Dimension
Known for its trendy, film-inspired aesthetic, the Tezza app has a secret weapon for fixing flat photos: texture. Our brains perceive textured surfaces as being more three-dimensional than perfectly smooth ones. A perfectly clean, digital photo can sometimes feel unnaturally flat. By adding a touch of grain, you break up those smooth digital gradients and give the image a tactile quality.
Tezza’s "Grain" slider is beautifully calibrated to feel organic and film-like. This texture not only adds a stylistic mood but also helps to unify the elements in your photo, from the deep shadows to the bright highlights. The app also has "Dust" overlays which, similar to Lens Distortions, can add a foreground layer that gives the impression of looking through a vintage lens, instantly creating a sense of depth.
Pro Tip: Pair the "Grain" effect with the "Blur" or "Glow" effect. Adding a very subtle glow to the highlights can soften them in a pleasing way, which, when combined with the sharpness of the grain, creates a complex texture that makes the image feel much more dynamic and less flat.
8. Retouch
Creating Depth by De-Cluttering
This one might seem counterintuitive, but it's a critical pro-level technique. Sometimes, a photo feels flat not because of the lighting, but because the background is too busy and competes with your subject. Retouch is a specialized app with one purpose: to remove unwanted objects from your photos flawlessly.
Think about it: depth is all about creating separation between your subject and its environment. If there’s a distracting signpost, a stray person, or a bright piece of trash in the background, the viewer's eye gets confused. By using Retouch's object removal tool to "paint out" these distractions, you simplify the background. A simpler, cleaner background naturally recedes, forcing all the attention onto your subject and creating a powerful sense of depth and focus. As my friend and fellow photographer Goh Ling Yong often says, "What you choose to remove from a photo is just as important as what you choose to keep in it."
Pro Tip: Use the "Line Removal" tool for more than just power lines. It’s fantastic for removing distracting cracks in a wall, stray hairs, or awkward creases in clothing that flatten the dimensionality of your subject.
9. Picsart
The Creative Swiss Army Knife
Picsart is packed with an almost overwhelming number of features, but for our purposes, we'll focus on a few that are perfect for adding depth. The "FX" section contains a variety of effects, including an excellent "HDR1" filter. HDR (High Dynamic Range) effects work by expanding the range between the darkest shadows and brightest highlights, often bringing out texture and detail that was previously hidden. This added texture can dramatically increase the sense of dimension.
Beyond that, Picsart’s "Lens Flare" tool is a great way to add a new light source to your image, which can sculpt your subject and create a sense of backlight that separates it from the background. You can also get creative with the "Brush" tool, using sparkle or bokeh brushes to paint foreground elements into your scene, adding a magical, layered look.
Pro Tip: Experiment with the "Mask" tool. You can overlay textures, light leaks, or even solid colors and then use the eraser to selectively reveal your original image. Try a "Dust" mask and erase it from your subject's face and body. This places the texture in the background and foreground, sandwiching your subject cleanly in the middle.
10. Afterlight
Creative Overlays and Finetuning Tools
Afterlight is a fantastic all-rounder that balances powerful core editing tools with creative extras. For depth, its standout features are the "Dusty" overlays and "Light Leak" effects. These film-inspired textures function much like the ones in Lens Distortions and Tezza, adding foreground elements that immediately create layers. A subtle light leak creeping in from the corner of the frame can suggest the sun hitting the lens, adding realism and dimension.
The app also features a great "Clarity" tool and an advanced "Curves" function for precise contrast control. A unique feature is its "Double Exposure" tool. You can use this creatively to add depth by blending your photo with another—for example, a texture shot or a photo of clouds. By blending a cloudy sky into the background of a portrait, you can replace a boring, flat backdrop with one that has texture and dimension.
Pro Tip: Afterlight allows you to pinch and zoom to place its light leak and dust overlays with precision. Don't just accept the default placement. Move the overlay around until it complements the existing light and composition of your photo for a much more natural and effective result.
Your Turn to Create Dimension
There you have it—a complete toolkit for breathing life and depth back into your smartphone photos. The key takeaway is that creating depth isn't about one single slider or filter. It’s a combination of techniques: controlling light and shadow, separating colors, adding texture, and removing distractions. It's about thinking like a painter, guiding the viewer's eye exactly where you want it to go.
Don't feel like you need to download all ten apps at once. Start with one or two that intrigue you most—perhaps Lightroom for its powerful controls or Focos for its magical blur. Experiment, play with the sliders, and see how these small adjustments can make a monumental difference. Your Instagram feed will thank you for it.
Now, I’d love to hear from you. Which of these tools are you most excited to try? Do you have a favorite "flat-photo-fixing" technique of your own? Share your thoughts and tips in the comments below!
About the Author
Goh Ling Yong is a content creator and digital strategist sharing insights across various topics. Connect and follow for more content:
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