Insta Worthy Editing
One of my personal struggles is that I love to take & share photos, but I also love having a visually appealing instagram. You may also know the struggle of loving a photo, but having it not match the vibe of your instagram. Well I am going to share my tips to make my pictures instagram ready.
Determining your Instagram Color Scheme...
can be a super helpful place to start out with your editing. I learned this fun idea on TikTok, but it is actually convenient for editing as well.
The first step is to take a screenshot of your instagram feed like this one. Try to get as many pictures in the image as possible. You can se this on its own to try & see what colors are most prominent or you can use the fun little TikTok trend that I found.
What you do from here is upload this screenshot onto instagram as if you were going to put it on your story. Using the coloring tool, click the color selector tool (looks like an eye dropper) & select the dominant color in each photo & color in the square.
The dominant color can either be the one that is in it the most, or it can be the brightest color. Either way, you should end up with a little something like this...
From this, you can clearly see that the theme of my instagram is blues & oranges! I love the cool tones that I have paired with a pop of bright warm oranges & reds.
Okay, so now you know your instagram color scheme, but what is next? How do you make your every day photos match this??
Creating Your Presets...
Not everyone loves presets because sometime they can be a little much or not match all of your pictures perfectly, but I think that compared to just regular filters, they are amazing!
Personally, I use LightRoom when I am creating my presets or editing my photos. I love it because you can get into the nitty gritty of the photos & change each and every color that you see.
That is how I get my images to match my Instagram theme. Even if the blues aren't the right blue or the oranges aren't the right orange, I can alter them a little bit so they are!
But how do you do this???
This took me some time to do because there are lots of colors that all interact with one another. But having the colors that you want to stick out already in mind, I would start by working with those colors. Get them to where you want them & then tinker with the others around it.
Make sure that every time you switch things up with your presets that you save it as another one! That way when you go to edit photos for instagram, you have a good variety to work with that pair well with any type of photo.
For a more specific example, here is one of my most recent instagram pictures. It was taken at a local gardening store by one of my girl friends (check out this post on planning a photoshoot with your girl friends!!)
Although I think that the original picture was cool, the bright oranges colors that I normally love were not popping as much as I would have hoped. Using LightRoom, I brought out those colors & generally brightened up the whole image!
Different Vibes...
Not everyone loves the super bright colors that I always use, so I made different presets as well using different settings within the app.
One of my favorites that I have made recently is a calm, vintage preset for one of my girl friends. We wanted to make it warmer as well as bring out the colors of the sunset.
Specifically for this preset, I decreased the saturation of the green & blue and increased the orange & pink tones. For effect, I also added more texture to the image to really promote the vintage feel.
Images with different lighting can need very different settings, so be aware that your presets may not work for all of your images.
Using the same preset on this images produced something more dramatic simply because the lighting was different.
Hopefully these tips are something that will help you in your future editing endeavors! If you want some editing advice, email them to me at atvialorraine@gmail.com and make sure to follow me on instagram for more examples!
