How I Edit My Photos for Instagram
As soon as I started getting more collaboration proposals on Instagram I knew that I had to level up my photo editing skills and my overall Instagram feed in order to be taken more seriously by brands and followers. I knew that in order for my Instagram feed to look more professional I had to decide on one certain mood and stick to it. Therefore, I decided to create a preset that allowed me to quickly adapt every picture to my style.
In this following blog article, I will show you how I edit my Instagram photos by sharing some insights into my preset while explaining where and why I made certain edits. If you wish for a more interactive view, you can also check out my YouTube video on “How I Edit My Instagram Pictures” here !
What Is a Lightroom Preset?
Let’s start off with a short explanation of the editing program that I am using and why decided on creating a preset. First of all, a preset can be seen as a filter that you can create by yourself in the photo editing program (or application) called Lightroom. Of course, there are also plenty of presets from other people that you can download some for free and some that you need to pay for.
The great thing about presets on Lightroom compared to simple filters on other photo editing applications is that you can manipulate them in detail for every single photo. This is something that I hardly recommend every time you apply a preset on a picture as every picture has a different type of lighting and colors. If you apply the same preset on for example a picture that was taken indoors and a picture taken on a sunny day, even if it’s the same preset they will still look different. So you still need to make some minor adjustments in order for every photo to match your Instagram feed or desired style.
Photo Editing Tutorial: Step-by-Step
Before getting into the detailed tutorial I would like to mention that I am no professional photographer or photo editor. All the things that I am going to show you are self-taught by viewing various YouTube videos and analyzing other people’s presets.
Also, at this point, I would like to refer to my other blog-article and YouTube video on “DIY Maternity Shoot” where I am showing an example of how I organize and shoot my Instagram pictures. In this blog article, I am only explaining the editing part.
Create an Album
In order to keep things organized I like to create a separate album for each occasion. In this case I created an album with the caption "Outdoor Maternity Shoot”. Having different albums on the Lightroom App also allows me to keep all the pictures I edit on one place and to only export those photos that I really like on my camera roll. By doing so I avoid having countless of similar pictures on my camera roll. I still prefer editing more pictures than necessary since some pictures turn out to look good after I edited them while other pictures that I really like don’t go well with my editing style.
Light
Usually after creating an album I have another step which will be to apply my preset and going from that I simply adjust the preset to each photo’s individual color and lighting condition. However, in this tutorial I am not starting off with the preset but rather start editing the picture step by step from the scratch.
Starting with the picture’s light settings. I almost never edit the exposure of a picture since I often made the experience that the attempt to brighten up a picture while using the ‘exposure’ feature immediately makes it look overexposed. Therefore, I like to play around with the other features. Starting off with the contrast, I usually minimize it to a total -100. By doing so, the picture usually already becomes much brighter. Next, I usually decrease highlights and increase shadows. This part is actually very different for each picture, so I usually almost every time make some adjustments here. Typically it’s a trade-off of these two: I change the highlights, then change the shadows and then sometimes go back and change highlights again. As for whites and blacks I usually only make changes if there is something special that I need to adjust. For example, if I have a white background, usually that looks rather yellowish or too bright, so I adjust it with the whites and if the picture is shot in direct sunlight usually my hair will appear light brown. Then I adjust it with blacks to make it look darker again.
Color
Moving on to the color settings, I rarely change anything here. I have temperature on +11, tint on +8 and vibrance on +75. Sometimes I increase saturation a little bit. This is mainly in order to make my skin-color look more healthy and warm. However, usually I only need to do this correction for pictures that are shot indoors as the artificial light usually makes the skin-color look a little bit different than natural.
In some photos it is also necessary to make some adjustments in the color-mix section. Usually I find myself making changes in this part when I need to adjust the color of the sky or the color for plants.
Effects
The most important part for me here is the grain which I almost always leave at 40. This edit definitely gives my pictures that vintage look and in addition it helps to reduce any impurities that might be visible on the face. Keep in mind that the only time when I suggest to reduce the gran level is for highly zoomed in pictures, as the grain effect will appear stronger. Another easy way to decrease the face impurities for portrait photos is to decrease texture a little bit. I really like to use this option rather than trying to erase impurities with a brush with other applications.
Detail
Last editing step is the sharpening, noise reduction and color noise reduction. Here, I usually don’t adjust anything from my preset and leave it like this.
Crop
Sometimes I crop the picture before exporting and sometimes I don’t. However, when cropping a full body picture I always make sure that the head is not higher than the second line of the grid and that the feet are right at the bottom and not cut off.
Export
I export the pictures that I really like on my camera roll before posting them on Instagram. Sometimes I also edit photos that I post on my Instagram story with this preset as well. In this case I usually don’t export them on my camera roll first, but directly export them to Instagram.
