Top 19 'Visual-Voice-Finding' Editing Tools to practice for Developing Your Signature Style on Instagram this year - Goh Ling Yong
Hey everyone! Welcome back to the blog. Let's talk about something that every photographer, content creator, and artist obsesses over, especially on a platform as visual as Instagram: finding your style. It’s that secret sauce, that unique fingerprint on your images that makes someone stop scrolling and say, "I know who shot that."
This "visual voice" is more than just slapping on the same filter every time. It's a combination of your shooting habits, your color palette, the mood you evoke, and the stories you tell. It’s the consistent thread that ties your work together into a cohesive, recognizable body of work. But how do you find it? The answer is simple but not easy: practice, experimentation, and having the right tools to explore your creativity.
This isn't just a list of apps; it's a curated toolkit for a journey of discovery. We're going to explore 19 powerful 'Visual-Voice-Finding' tools, from industry-standard software to niche mobile apps. Think of this as your personal editing playground for the year. The goal is to experiment, break things, and ultimately find the workflow and aesthetic that feels authentically you.
1. Adobe Lightroom (Classic & Mobile)
Let's start with the undisputed champion. Lightroom is the ultimate digital darkroom for a reason. It's a powerhouse for organizing, editing, and exporting your work. For photographers serious about developing a signature style, mastering Lightroom is non-negotiable. It's the sandbox where you can build your look from the ground up, with precise control over every pixel.
The magic of Lightroom lies in its granular controls. The Tone Curve is your command center for contrast and mood, while the HSL/Color panel lets you craft a unique color palette by targeting and shifting specific hues, saturations, and luminances. The new AI-powered masking tools are a game-changer, allowing you to make targeted adjustments to skies, subjects, or backgrounds with a single click, ensuring your stylistic choices are applied with precision.
Voice-Finding Tip: Don't just rely on presets! Spend a week editing the same 5 photos using only the Tone Curve and HSL panels. See how dramatically you can change the mood. Push your greens toward blue, your oranges toward red, or create a moody, S-curve contrast. This deep dive is how you move from borrowing a style to creating one.
2. VSCO
VSCO is often the first step for many creators in their style journey, and it remains one of the best. Known for its subtle, film-emulating presets, VSCO is brilliant for exploring different aesthetics without overwhelming you with sliders. Its community and curated content also provide a constant stream of inspiration.
While its presets are the main draw, the real strength of VSCO for voice-finding is its ability to create and save "Recipes." A recipe is your unique combination of a preset plus your own tweaks to exposure, contrast, white balance, and more. This encourages you to use a preset as a starting point, not a final destination, fostering a more personal editing process.
Voice-Finding Tip: Choose one or two preset packs that resonate with you (like the moody A-series or the vibrant C-series) and commit to them for a month. Use the "Recipe" feature to save a version with your personal tweaks. This forces consistency, which is a cornerstone of a signature style.
3. Snapseed
Developed by Google, Snapseed is a completely free, surprisingly powerful mobile editing app that belongs on every photographer's phone. It offers a fantastic blend of one-tap fixes and professional-level tools, including healing brushes, curves, and selective adjustments. It's the Swiss Army knife of mobile editors.
For style development, Snapseed’s "Selective" tool and "Brush" tool are incredible. They allow you to paint adjustments (like brightness, contrast, or saturation) onto specific parts of your image. Want to make just the blues in the sky pop? Or add a touch of warmth only to your subject's skin? Snapseed makes it intuitive and easy, helping you learn the art of guiding the viewer's eye.
Voice-Finding Tip: Use the "Tune Image" tool and tap the "Ambiance" slider. This single slider intelligently adjusts contrast and saturation to create depth and vibrancy. See how it interacts with different types of light in your photos. It can quickly become a core part of your editing workflow.
4. Adobe Photoshop
If Lightroom is the darkroom, Photoshop is the fine-art studio where anything is possible. While its learning curve is steeper, Photoshop offers unparalleled control for stylistic expression. It’s where you can dive into complex compositing, advanced color grading with Gradient Maps, and textural work using layers and blend modes.
Photoshop is essential for photographers who want to create a more painterly, surreal, or meticulously crafted style. Tools like Frequency Separation for skin retouching, advanced object removal with the Content-Aware Fill, and the ability to add and manipulate light with custom brushes allow you to move beyond basic adjustments and truly author an image.
Voice-Finding Tip: Explore "Gradient Maps." This powerful tool maps a gradient of colors onto the luminance values of your image. Experimenting with different color combinations can help you develop a highly unique and artistic color-grading style that’s impossible to replicate with simple filters.
5. Capture One Pro
A direct competitor to Lightroom, Capture One Pro is revered by professional studio, portrait, and commercial photographers for its superior RAW processing and phenomenal color-editing tools. Its tethered shooting capabilities are best-in-class, but its real strength for style-finding lies in its advanced Color Editor.
Capture One's Color Editor allows you to create incredibly precise color ranges and adjust their hue, saturation, and lightness with surgical precision. It even has a dedicated Skin Tone tool that helps achieve consistent, beautiful skin tones across an entire shoot—a key component of any portrait photographer's signature style. The layer-based editing system also provides a non-destructive workflow similar to Photoshop, but built right into your primary RAW editor.
Voice-Finding Tip: Dive deep into the Advanced Color Editor. Isolate the specific shade of green in the foliage of your landscape shots and shift its hue slightly or reduce its saturation. This level of control, applied consistently, is what separates an amateur edit from a professional, signature look.
6. Tezza App
Created by influencer and creator Tezza Barton, this app is a one-stop-shop for achieving a trendy, film-inspired, and cohesive aesthetic on Instagram. It’s packed with gorgeous presets, vintage textures, and easy-to-use video editing tools that all share a common stylistic DNA.
The Tezza app is perfect for those who are drawn to a warm, retro, and slightly grainy look. The app simplifies the process of adding dust, light leaks, and other filmic effects. Its greatest strength is its cohesiveness; using the photo and video filters together helps you maintain your signature style across all forms of Instagram content, from static posts to Reels.
Voice-Finding Tip: Pick a single filter you love and pair it with one of the "Frames" or "Textures" (like "Dust 1"). Apply this simple combination to all your photos for two weeks. You’ll be amazed at how quickly your grid starts to look like a curated artboard.
7. RNI Films
For the true film lover, RNI (Really Nice Images) Films is a must-have. This mobile app is dedicated to one thing: creating authentic-looking simulations of classic film stocks. It uses real film profiles to generate its looks, resulting in presets that feel more nuanced and less "digital" than many competitors.
The app's beauty is in its simplicity. You choose a film category (like Negative, Slide, or Instant), select a specific stock (like Kodak Portra 400 or Fuji Velvia 50), and then make minor adjustments. It teaches you to think in terms of film stocks, helping you discover if you’re drawn to the warm, gentle tones of Portra or the high-contrast punch of Agfa.
Voice-Finding Tip: Instead of trying every filter, do some research on classic film stocks. Read about what Fuji Pro 400H was known for (beautiful blues and greens) and then see how the RNI version translates to your own photos. This intentional approach connects your editing choices to photographic history.
8. Afterlight
Afterlight has been a staple in mobile photography for years, and it continues to be a fantastic tool for creative expression. While it has a solid set of core editing tools, it truly shines with its extensive library of creative effects, including light leaks, dust overlays, prism effects, and double exposures.
This app is your playground for adding analog imperfections and artistic flair. If your desired style is dreamy, nostalgic, or a little bit grungy, Afterlight provides the textures to get you there. The ability to layer and blend these effects gives you a high degree of control over the final look, preventing it from feeling like a generic filter.
Voice-Finding Tip: Use the "Dusty" textures, but lower the opacity to around 15-20%. This adds a subtle, organic texture to your digital photos without overpowering them. Consistency in this subtle touch can become a quiet but recognizable part of your style.
9. Luminar Neo
Powered by AI, Luminar Neo is designed to make complex edits incredibly simple. It’s available as both a standalone app and a plugin for Lightroom/Photoshop. Its AI-driven tools like Sky Replacement, Portrait Bokeh AI, and Enhance AI can produce stunning results in seconds.
For style-finding, Luminar is a tool for radical experimentation. You can completely transform the mood of a photo by swapping a bland sky for a dramatic sunset, or add a dreamy, soft-focus background to a portrait shot on a simple lens. While it's important not to let the AI do all the work, it can open up creative possibilities and help you define a more fantastical or surreal aesthetic.
Voice-Finding Tip: Use the "Mood" tool, which applies professional LUTs (Look-Up Tables) to your image. Find a LUT that creates a color palette you love, then use the other sliders in Luminar to refine the look and make it your own.
10. A Color Story
If your desired aesthetic is bright, fresh, and full of vibrant color, A Color Story is the app for you. Created by the team at A Beautiful Mess, this app is designed to enhance the colors already in your photo, making whites pop and colors sing, rather than muting them with a moody filter.
The app features over 400 filters created by professional photographers, with a focus on clean, poppy aesthetics. Its real power, however, lies in its selective editing tools and its "Color+" tool, which allows you to target and boost specific colors in your image. Just as Goh Ling Yong emphasizes the importance of fundamentals, this app helps you master the fundamental element of color.
Voice-Finding Tip: Go through your favorite photos and identify your "hero" color—the one that appears most often (e.g., the blue of the ocean, the green of plants). Use A Color Story's tools to subtly enhance that specific color in every photo, creating a consistent color thread through your feed.
11. Planoly
Developing a signature style isn't just about editing individual photos; it's about how they look together. Planoly is an official Instagram partner and a visual planning tool that lets you arrange your upcoming posts in a drag-and-drop grid. This is absolutely essential for curating a cohesive feed.
Using a planner like Planoly allows you to see the bigger picture. You can test how a new photo looks next to your existing ones before you post it. Does the color palette clash? Is the mood consistent? This macro view is crucial for refining your visual voice and ensuring your Instagram grid feels intentional and professional.
Voice-Finding Tip: Before posting, upload 3-4 different edited versions of your new photo into Planoly. Drag them around your grid to see which version best complements the surrounding images. This simple step will transform your feed from a random collection of pictures into a curated gallery.
12. TouchRetouch
Sometimes, a great photo is compromised by a distracting element—a piece of trash, a power line, or an unwanted person in the background. TouchRetouch is a one-trick pony, but it's the best in the world at what it does: removing unwanted objects from your photos seamlessly.
A clean, distraction-free composition is a hallmark of many professional styles. By meticulously removing anything that pulls focus from your subject, you create a more powerful and intentional image. This act of "digital tidying" can elevate your photography and contribute to a polished, minimalist aesthetic.
Voice-Finding Tip: Don't just use it for obvious distractions. Look for small, subtle things that clutter the frame—a distracting bright leaf in the corner or a stray piece of lint on a shirt. Cleaning up these minor details consistently will give your entire portfolio a more refined feel.
13. Huji Cam
Want to inject a dose of 90s nostalgia into your feed? Huji Cam perfectly replicates the look of a disposable film camera, complete with random light leaks, chromatic aberration, and a date stamp in the corner (which you can turn off).
While it's a "one-tap" app with no editing controls, using it can be a fun exercise in letting go of perfection. It forces you to focus on composition and moment, knowing the "look" is already taken care of. Interspersing Huji shots into your regular feed can add a playful, raw, and nostalgic element to your overall style.
Voice-Finding Tip: Use Huji not as your primary camera, but for capturing candid, in-between moments. A Huji photo of your coffee between two perfectly edited portraits can break up the monotony and add a layer of personality to your grid.
14. SKRWT
A powerful yet often-overlooked aspect of a signature style is perspective. SKRWT is a specialty app designed for correcting lens distortion and perspective issues. If you shoot a lot of architecture, interiors, or anything with strong lines, this app is a secret weapon.
SKRWT allows you to straighten converging lines and fix barrel distortion, resulting in images that look incredibly clean, professional, and intentional. Developing a style built on perfect symmetry and straight lines can be incredibly powerful and visually satisfying.
Voice-Finding Tip: Use the "4-Point-Correction" tool on a photo of a building taken from a low angle. Manually adjust the corners until all the vertical lines are perfectly parallel. See how this changes the photo from a simple snapshot to a piece of architectural art.
15. Focos
For iPhone users with dual-camera systems, Focos is a magical app. It allows you to edit the depth-of-field effect in your Portrait Mode photos after you’ve taken them. You can change the aperture, adjust the bokeh shape, and even refocus the image on a different subject.
This tool gives you incredible control over the "look" of your lens. You can develop a style characterized by a very shallow, dreamy depth of field or a specific type of bokeh. It's a way to achieve a professional "fast lens" look without needing to buy expensive new gear.
Voice-Finding Tip: Experiment with the different lens simulations in Focos. See how a "creamy" bokeh versus a "swirly" bokeh changes the entire mood of your portrait. Find one you like and use it consistently to give your portraits a recognizable character.
16. Picsart
Picsart is more than just a photo editor; it's a full-blown creative suite. It excels at collages, stickers, text overlays, and artistic effects. If your visual voice is more graphic, scrapbook-inspired, or avant-garde, Picsart is your ultimate playground.
You can use its "Dispersion" tool to make it look like your subject is breaking apart, or use its layering capabilities to create complex, multi-image composites. This is the tool for creators who see a photograph as just the first layer of a larger artistic piece.
Voice-Finding Tip: Try the "Double Exposure" tool. Blend a portrait with a landscape or a cityscape. This technique, when done thoughtfully and consistently, can create a powerful and surreal signature style that tells a deeper story.
17. CapCut
In today's Instagram, your visual voice extends to video. CapCut is a free, incredibly intuitive, and powerful mobile video editor. It makes it easy to trim clips, add music, create smooth transitions, and—most importantly for style—apply color grading.
To maintain a cohesive aesthetic, your Reels and video posts should match the look and feel of your photos. CapCut allows you to apply filters (or LUTs) and make manual adjustments to contrast, saturation, and more, ensuring your video content doesn't break the visual consistency of your feed.
Voice-Finding Tip: Export a custom LUT from your favorite photo editor (like Lightroom or Photoshop) and import it into CapCut. This allows you to apply your exact, unique color grade to your videos, achieving perfect stylistic harmony between your photos and Reels.
18. UNUM
Similar to Planoly, UNUM is another excellent visual planner that helps you design and curate your Instagram grid. It offers deep analytics and a host of creative tools, but its core function for voice-finding is its grid layout space.
What sets UNUM apart for some users is its user interface and additional features like the "Color Palette" tool, which analyzes your grid and shows you your dominant colors. This feedback is invaluable, helping you understand if you're subconsciously leaning toward a certain palette and allowing you to lean into it more intentionally.
Voice-Finding Tip: Use the Color Palette feature to analyze your last 20 posts. Are you surprised by the results? Use this data to consciously choose your next few photos to either reinforce your dominant palette or intentionally shift it in a new direction.
19. Your Camera's Native RAW Editor
Don't overlook the powerful editor built right into your phone's Photos app! Both iOS and Android have surprisingly capable RAW editors that allow you to adjust exposure, highlights, shadows, black point, saturation, and more.
For the minimalist who wants to avoid app-hopping, mastering the native editor can be a fantastic exercise in creative constraint. It forces you to rely on the fundamentals of light and color rather than on stylized filters. You can develop a clean, natural, and authentic style by simply learning to get the most out of the tool you already have. My journey, much like Goh Ling Yong's, has always been about mastering the basics first.
Voice-Finding Tip: Challenge yourself to edit and post a photo using only your phone's built-in editor. Focus on getting a perfect exposure and white balance. This "back to basics" approach can be a refreshing reset and help you discover the core of your photographic vision.
Your Voice is a Journey, Not a Destination
There you have it—19 incredible tools to help you on your quest to develop a signature style. Remember, the goal isn't to download all of them and become a master of none. It's to experiment, play, and find the one or two that click with your creative vision.
Your visual voice will evolve over time, and that’s a beautiful thing. It will change as you grow as an artist and a person. The most important thing is to start the process, to edit with intention, and to create work that feels true to you.
Now I want to hear from you. Which of these tools are already in your workflow? And which one are you most excited to try out this year? Drop a comment below and let's start a conversation
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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