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The Beginner’s Guide to Editing Instagram Photos (The Pro’s Way!)

Editorial — Thu, 04 Feb 2021 11:04:05 +0000

You’ve long dreamed of learning to edit Instagram photos like a pro, so your images would resemble ones uploaded by your favorite celebs.

Right?

No worries! Here’s good news:

I’m about to turn your dreams into reality.

This guide covers the steps you could take to edit your Instagram pictures like a professional—even if you have zero editing experience.

Before You Start Editing Your Instagram Photos

Stay ahead of the curve and be aware of the latest Instagram trends and don’t just set out to edit random, low-quality images. You won’t love the result regardless of the efforts you put in.

So the first step to uploading a beautifully edited photo on Instagram is to take a clean shot.

Thankfully, you don’t need an expensive camera to capture lovely photographs.

Got an Android or iPhone?

Then you’ve got all you need to take excellent shots.

Here are 3 quick tips for capturing attractive photos using your mobile device:

1. Clean Your Phone’s Lens

Naturally, dirt from a greasy hand, wet pockets, or dusty surroundings could easily accumulate around your phone’s lens, making your images look blurry or faded.

So, it’s essential you check (and clean) your phone’s lens before taking your pictures.

Soft material like a handkerchief should fix this issue in a few seconds.

2. Choose Natural Light

Don’t go around taking pictures with your phone’s flash on. Unlike natural light, the phone’s flash may alter specific colors and affect your images’ overall quality.

So to get a beautiful and clear image to use on Instagram, rely on natural light instead of your phone’s flash when taking your photographs.

This might mean that you’d have to take your photographs outdoors or take your indoor photos from an angle with rays from a natural light source.

3. Embrace Multiple Perspectives & Avoid Long-Range Shots

To get a clearer picture when taking photographs on a mobile phone, move closer to the subject rather than zooming in from afar. Doing this is one smart way to obtain high-quality images.

Photos that are captured from odd angles, orientation and multiple perspectives often end up unique and beautiful.

Instead of standing opposite the subject while taking a shot, explore other angles to see which would turn out the best. And don’t forget to play around with negative space too.

Learn more ways to improve your photography skills.

How to Edit Your Instagram Photos Like a Pro

Once you’ve got a clean, high-quality shot, it’s time to add bits of freshness to your picture.

Depending on the result you’ve pictured in mind, you could edit your images directly within the Instagram app or use an external tool to achieve extra sleekness.

Using the Built-in Editor to Edit Instagram Photos Like a Pro

1. Upload Your Photo

If you already have images on your Instagram page, then it means you know how to upload a photo on the app. So you can skip to the next step.

But, if you are entirely new to this feature of the app, then I’m going to walk you through the process quickly.

First, open the Instagram app on your mobile device.

Second, tap the (+) button on the upper right corner of your phone’s screen.

Third, locate the picture you’d like to transform from your phone’s gallery.

Tap the picture to select it, then tap the arrow on the upper right corner to upload it.

Once your picture uploads successfully, it’s time to pick up your editing wand and do some magical enhancements.

2. Pick a Filter

Instagram has a series of filters. You’re free to try them all and see which would work best for your image.

The process of choosing a filter can easily become an endless loop. Because, sometimes, more than one filter might catch your attention, even though you know you are to pick just one—and then reserve the remaining for your future uploads.

If you ever fall into this situation, here are two foolproof tricks I always use to break the loop:

I scroll through my Instagram feed, find someone else’s edited picture I love, and then use the filter the person used (or one close to it).
I check my previous uploads, find a picture that got lots of attention (likes & comments), and then re-use the filter I used there.

These tricks help to cut down the time you’d naturally spend sorting through numerous filters that might all appear cool at the same time.

3. Enhance Your Image

Start your adjustments by playing around with Instagram’s lux feature.

This feature helps to automatically adjust the contrast and saturation of your image, thereby increasing its vibrancy, highlighting little vital details, and making it look more attractive generally.

To use this option, hit the magic wand on the top of your screen and then adjust the slider from left to right to enhance your image’s looks.

After tweaking the lux, navigate to the edit tab.

You can straighten your photo (if it’s slanted), reduce/increase its brightness, add shadows, sharpen your image, and make other adjustments.

There’s no general rule to follow here.

Carefully move the different editing tools’ sliders and find the settings that’d help make your image look better. Just avoid overdoing things so your photo won’t appear overly edited and unnatural.

After enhancing your image as you desire, hit the blue arrow on the top of your screen to save your settings.

Now you’re done, you can go ahead and post your image publicly.

You can also try out Lightroom presets as an alternative to Instagram filters although you need to be more of a professional to know how to use Lightroom and its presets. In case you’re not familiar with it, check out this quick guide on how to install Lightroom Presets.

Using a Dedicated Photo-Editing Tool to Edit Instagram Photos Like a Pro

You can choose from several mobile and web-based tools to edit your Instagram photos.

In this guide, though, we shall go over the steps for editing Instagram photos like a pro using Colorcinch.

So let’s begin.

1. Upload Your Image

Open this page and click on the blue button.

Next, locate and select the Instagram image you’d like to edit.

2. Choose a Filter

Colorcinch has a load of stunning filters suitable for editing pictures for both business and personal needs.

We’ve previously reviewed loads of Colorcinch’s filters (and ones from other software), so you can read this guide to get some ideas.

When you find a filter that goes well with your image and perfectly fits your needs, move the slider from left to right to adjust the filter strength, and then hit APPLY.

3. Enhance Your Image

Colorcinch has all the basic editing features you’ll find in most editing apps and even on Instagram.

To adjust the brightness, contrast, exposure, and other features of your picture, navigate to the edit tab, click on a photo enhancement option, and carefully move the sliders from left to right.

4. Download Your Image

After editing your Instagram image using Colorcinch, hit the arrow on the top of your screen, and then click on My Computer (to download the image to your mobile/desktop).

You can now proceed to upload your image on your Instagram page without editing it within the app.

Unleash Your Editing Prowess

Quality is crucial if you desire to obtain a pro-looking, irresistible photo at the end of the day.

So ensure your original image is of high resolution and quality.

If you would prefer to upload a stock photo rather than use yours, ensure you download a high-resolution version of the picture.

Creativity is one vital ingredient for editing photos beautifully.

Let yours burst forth!

The post The Beginner’s Guide to Editing Instagram Photos (The Pro’s Way!) appeared first on Photo to Cartoon – Cartoonize Yourself & Create Avatar Characters for Free.

3 Quick and Easy Ways to Brighten Photos

Editorial — Mon, 12 Oct 2020 19:07:12 +0000

Have you ever taken a few photos – whether with your phone or a camera – only to later discover that they came out way too dark?

If yes, then this article is for you! The good news is that you can quickly brighten photos using an online image editor.

In this article we’re going to take a look at how to use Colorcinch (or a similar online web-based photo editor) and break down 3 quick and easy ways to do just that!

Let’s begin!

The first thing you need to do is upload one of your underexposed images in Colorcinch, or a similar online photo editor.

PRO TIP: If you work with lots of images (on a Mac), you can use Duplicate File Finder to detect and wipe out all unwanted image duplicates—so you will locate your desired files faster.

Next click the Edit tab in the left-hand column, followed by Exposure.

Once that has been selected you will see a list of slider options to choose from, such as: Brightness, Highlights, and Shadows. Additionally, there is a Contrast slider, which I will explain below.

1. How to Use the Brightness Slider:

The Brightness slider can be a great first option when dealing with slightly darker images that don’t require too much correcting.

Increasing the brightness in an image will target the tones evenly rather than having a heavy priority on the brightest areas.

For example:

By simply sliding the Brightness slider to + 15, I start to increase the overall brightness of the image. The rule of thumb here is: Slide to the right to brighten your photo and slide to the left to darken it!

PRO TIP: Do note that when you increase the brightness in your images, you will also lose some contrast and saturation in the process.

To easily correct this you can slightly raise the Contrast slider up a few notches. In this example I added + 10 contrast to counter the added brightness.

PRO TIP: Although the amount of contrast and saturation in an image is subjective, I would recommend not going too heavy-handed on these sliders, so that a natural balance can be maintained.

Another thing that I like to do is to add just a bit more saturation back into the image.

After making your adjustments to the Brightness and Contrast sliders, click the Apply button to save those changes.

Next select the Color tab and slightly adjust the Saturation slider to add a bit more saturation (color) back.

Typically, I won’t push the saturation too high and in this case + 5 works for me.

Make sure to click on the Apply button before saving your new image!

PRO TIP: For every change that you make, you may find that you have to readjust some of the other settings. What we’re essentially doing here is micro fine tuning to keep a nice balance.

And the final result!

EDITOR’S NOTE: Ready to save? Skip to the “Saving Your Image” section

2. How to Use the Highlights Slider:

The Highlights slider will have more of a priority on the brighter areas of the image – known as the highlights – rather than the overall brightness of the image.

A good example of this would be in an image with a lot of white areas. In this image the snow is looking pretty gray and is lacking brightness in the highlight areas.

By using the Highlights slider, I can target these highlight areas more so, which in turn will make the snow look whiter, rather than gray. In addition, this will add some nice punch to the image!

To achieve this I simply raised the Highlights slider to + 50 and then increased the Contrast slider to + 20.

In the brightness section above, I mentioned needing to maintain a balance and the same concept applies here. We need to counterbalance our increase to the highlights so that we don’t lose too much contrast in the overall image.

If we only increased the Highlights slider the image would tend to look more flat rather than defined.

Once you’re happy with your changes click the Apply button. The final step would be to save your image.

3. How to Use the Shadows Slider:

Using the Shadows slider can be a great way to fix underexposed images, as this will brighten up any darker areas within your image. The reason that some images tend to come out darker is because some scenes have too great of a contrast between the brightest areas and darkest areas.

Examples of this include:

Shooting into the sun
Any time we have a backlit subject (sun behind the subject)
During the afternoon hours when the sun is at its highest and harshest

Unfortunately, modern day technology can’t always capture the full dynamic range in these types of situations.

To make up for this limitation, cameras will try and expose for that brightest areas, in order to protect them. By doing so, the darker areas of the photo will come out darker.

Thankfully, due to editing software, we can easily recover the shadow areas and bring back detail and brightness.

Let’s have a look at an example of this.

In the before and after we can see the deer originally appearing darker than the sky.

By increasing the Shadows slider I could quickly brighten up the darker areas. This will help even out, or balance the overall brightness of the image.

As with the previous examples, I added a little bit of Contrast to help maintain the balance of the image.

Let’s move on to the final step – saving your image!

Saving Your Image:

Once you’re happy with your adjustments and have clicked on Apply, you can click on the Save drop-down menu and select the location in which you want to save your image.

Next, name your image, select the file type, (JPG, PNG, PDF), as well as the quality and file size.

PRO TIP: I usually save my images as .JPG and set my image quality to 100%. However, if file size is an issue, you can set this to 80% to dramatically reduce the file size while still maintaining 99% of the image quality!

Conclusion:

I hope you found this tutorial useful and can use some of these methods to help quickly brighten up your underexposed photos!

If you’re interested in checking out Colorcinch, we offer a Basic account, which is free to use, requires no registration, and provides access to numerous essential effects and features. Click here to start editing with Colorcinch Basic!

The post 3 Quick and Easy Ways to Brighten Photos appeared first on Photo to Cartoon – Cartoonize Yourself & Create Avatar Characters for Free.