I used to laugh at Instagram. It was just something I thought I would never really get the hang of but I was SO wrong. I started when my brother said "I think you'll like it, trust me" and I grudging took the plunge by casually posting pictures of family and the occasional flower here and there.
However, over time my passion for capturing beautiful moments really started to grow because of Insta (the cool way to say it of course) and I can honestly say that I have began to see things differently. I find beauty in everything and it's one of the things I personally really like about myself. So without further blabbing by yours truly, here is my process of editing pictures for Instagram and also a few of my tips. It's important to remember that there is literally no wrong way to edit and you should always do what you think is best! This is just how I do things.
1. Find Inspiration and Keep an Eye Out
The first step here is choose something to photograph. You might be saying "Zainab, this is so obvious" but it's important that I mention it. This is anything that inspires you or really anything you find pleasing. As you can see above, I don't stick to a theme and instead I literally photograph anything that catches my eye. If you want to photograph something, no matter how small, go for it! You'll never know what turns out to be one of your favorite pictures.
2. Shoot where there is light
This is also very crucial for my process. I do not use a DSLR for my photos and everything is shot on my iPhone. That being said, many of my fellow iPhone users know that the night shooting capabilities are severely limited on the phone so it's best to shoot during the day where there is tons of natural light or really anywhere where you can have some sort of light. This isn't to say that you shouldn't shoot at night but it is tough on the phone. Use your best judgement.
3. Process in VSCO
This is my go to app for editing photos. I really like my pictures to be bright, vivid and crisp so I almost always increase brightness and sharpen my picture. I also tend to straighten my pictures After doing that, I try to enhance the natural colors of the photo by maybe increasing the contrast slightly. Usually after that, I like to go through the various filters and choose one to my liking. Usually I lean more towards the A4-A6 or C1-C3 filters, where I play around with the strength of the filters. These often brighten up my pictures and bring out the colors even more. If I have a picture of people instead of items, I try to also play around with the skin tone option on VSCO. Skin tone is a fairly new part of the app and here is what the people at VSCO say about it:
"When creating portraits, it can be frustrating when the subject's skin color photographs slightly green or red, often due to the lighting situation. Also, images straight out of camera can many times contain splotchy skin tones that look unappealing. Using the Skin Tone tool helps to even skin tones as well as shift skin colors to achieve a more natural looking glow"
This is a feature that I use very sparingly but it can be helpful. It's all trial and error a lot of times.
4. Crop just the right amount and caption
In my personal opinion, one of the most frustrating things about Instagram is that pictures have to be cropped. I honestly just use my best judgement here and try to keep the main parts of the picture in the center. Afterwards, I caption and press upload.
And we're done! Honestly, it seems like a lot but once you get the hang of your own personal process, it's actually quite fun. I look forward to taking and editing pictures :)
Let me know your process for editing pictures and post a comment below!
On a side note: Other than VSCO cam, Snapseed and Polarr are FANTASTIC free photo editing apps. I have them as well but I use VSCO cam the most.
xx
