A good Instagram layout is key to help you gain followers, get noticed and get more sales. An increase in followers leads to more opportunities to promote your brand with different platforms and companies. With over 1 billion active users today, having a curated Instagram feed matters for every brand out there. Take your company’s feed to new heights using these photo editing tricks designed to help with engagement.
1. Use Several Photo Editing Applications
Every professional Instagram user has favorite apps that allow them to transform an ordinary shot into an attention-grabbing photo. Apps like Snapseed and VSCO are great options to start with. Snapseed is great for editing and expanding images, as well as refining only a particular piece of a photo while VSCO boasts a plethora of unique and high-quality filters aimed at Instagram photo editing has while also taking advantage of integrated image processing features and a built-in camera with intuitive controls.
2. Size Your Photos Correctly
It might sound simple but using correctly sized photos can make a world of difference when it comes to creating a good looking Insta feed. When planning or editing a photo for Instagram keep in mind that it needs to be square to display properly. Specifically, you will want your image to be 1080px by 1080px to avoid being stretched or shrunk after upload. Luckily, many phones offer a square photo functionality you can use when first taking your photos. If you’re phone doesn’t have this you can always resize them after the fact with Photoshop or one of the apps we mentioned earlier. Some other important rules of thumb for uploading photos correctly are that they can only be JPG or PNG files and must be 30MB or smaller.
3. Preserve Natural Skin Tone
When you edit photos for Instagram, especially portraits, you need to keep a natural skin tone. Don’t get too carried away with skin retouching, if you go too far with color correction and other adjustments your subject might end up looking unnatural or unhealthy. Every time you apply such filters, make sure to finish the process with manual corrections to preserve the natural beauty of the tone. VSCO offers a built-in skin tone slider, allowing smoothing out skin tones without going overboard and tools to fix color casts without relying on destructive filters.
4. Find Your Color Gamma
When posting on your feed, it’s important to stick to a particular color gamut, focusing on the background, color objects or filters. Popular styles include posting images with similar colors (warm, cool and neutral tones), picking several shades of the same color or changing your color theme based on the seasons. If you are a business owner and want to make your Instagram page popular among clients, choosing colors that correspond to those on your logo makes sense so that people will immediately recognize your brand.
Are you trying out any of the above ideas? Let us know in a social post, and don’t forget to follow us on all of our social platforms. Stay up to date on our monthly newsletters, full of more helpful tips and tricks!
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