Today I thought I would share my photo editing process for Instagram. I love Instagram and I love sharing photos so hopefully you will find it useful. Some of my photos are taken using my digital SLR so the process I use changes depending on what camera I took the photo with. I know some people think not using a phone is cheating but my view has always been use the best camera you have available. Sometimes this is my phone and sometimes this is my SLR.

HOW I EDIT INSTAGRAM PHOTOS

Another little handy tip for any bloggers out there. You can change your Instagram account to a business account. All you need to do is link it to a Facebook page. By doing this you can see how many views your photos and profile page got. It can also show you when most of your followers are active so you can schedule posts around that.

USING PHOTOSHOP

I use a combination of Lightroom and Photoshop to edit my images. I realise that for most people Photoshop isn’t something they can justify having. But I have the Creative Cloud subscription because I need it for my course. GIMP is a good free alternative if you don’t want to pay anything.

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I import the images onto my PC using Lightroom then open them in Photoshop. I use the Camera RAW filter to edit my photos, you can do the exact same editing process in Lightroom but I find it a bit easier in Photoshop. There are no hard rules for how I edit my photos, usually I increase the brightness, make sure the white parts of the image are a true white and increase the saturation. Basically I try and make my images look very bright and colourful.

I crop my images into a square and save them at 1080 by 1080 pixels. I then save this file to my Google Drive, which I can then find again using the Drive app on my phone and open it in Instagram.

USING VSCO

If I am out and about or occasionally at home and feeling lazy I will use my phone to take Instagram pictures. I should point out that there is nothing wrong with taking photos on your phone. Personally I feel that between my phone and camera I get better pictures out of my camera, but phones have become so advanced now that you can get some really good photos.

VSCO is a great little free app. It has photo editing features and also has a social media side. The social media side is really skewed more towards professional photography rather than selfies but it’s still fun to look at. I know I said the app was free but some of the filters you need to pay for. These are usually pretty cheap though, around £1-2, they also have sales where some are discounted and even given away for free.

I import my photos into VSCO and use the S3 filter. This is the filter I use whit all my photos to give them a cohesive look. I feel that this on in particular makes my photos look very bright, especially when there is a lot of white in the image. I will go on to adjust the brightness and contrast just depending on the photo. Then adjust the tint if the whites aren’t showing through as true white.

I will occasionally crop the photo in the VSCO app but it really just depends on what I’m using the image for. If I’m just posting it to Instagram I won’t crop the image since I can do this in Instagram. But if it’s a photo that I know will be going on my blog I’ll crop the photo to my desired size in the app.

FINALLY

I hope everyone found this useful. I suppose I should also take this moment to promote my Instagram page which you should totally go follow.

instagram.com/thepaperkindco

Thanks for reading.
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