HOW I TAKE AND EDIT MY INSTAGRAM PHOTOS

Hello my lovely pumpkins! Today, I am sharing with you how I edit my Instagram photos. I am very picky about what I post on Instagram because I love my feed to be aesthetic, with fall inspired colors and vintage vibes! Hence, today, I am sharing with you my tips and tricks to achieve a beautiful and consistent feed. Personally, I don’t use any application to fix my physical features. I only fix the lighting, colors and texture of the photos.

I want my feed to reflect who I am and what I like. At the same time, I love my feed to be, not theatrical, but staged. Like an editorial photoshoot. I highly inspire myself from Vogue photoshoots or vogue aesthetics.

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Now, don’t forget to check out my post: PRIDE MAKEUP LOOK and let’s get into it.

How I take and edit my Instagram photos

 

Tools

First of all, I take my photos with my iPhone XS. It has a great camera under any lighting and I love how everything looks very detailed even if the light is a bit overexposed. Unlike, my old iPhone, the light adjust itself in my iPhone XS, which means, the photo never ends up too overexposed nor too underexposed. Moreover, the colors never too saturated. IPhone cameras are my favorites!

Light

I usually always use natural lighting because it looks the best in my opinion. However, I try to avoid as much as possible, shadows because that’s how the light can look messed up if you don’t want to. I know amazing photos with lots of shadows, it really depends what you want to create. But, try to have as much control over the lighting as possible. Because, it you have too much shadows, it might be harder for your to fix the light. If you want the darker side to look brighter, the brighter side will be too overexposed, for example. For that, you can use a reflector a.k.a a white paper or board that will reflect the light on a shadowed part of your photo.

Set up

In my Instagram, I take three types of photos: outfit photos, makeup looks and product shots. Makeup look require nothing, I just choose the same white background to keep the focus on my face.

Outfit Photos

For my ootd shots, I always choose an outfit ahead of time the outfit I am going to wear, my props and the location. I never take a photo on the spot unless the location happens to match perfectly my outfit.

I personally love old building, Parisian type of buildings in my photos or I love building with red bricks so that’s what I always go for as background. In the winter, I can’t go outside so I go for my white wall. I also make sure there’s always touches of brown in the location so that everything looks coherent.

I also choose very carefully my props, they need to match with my outfit so that everything looks coherent. It sometimes takes my hours to choose which prop I want to have. However, I NEVER buy anything just for a photo, it’s always things I have at home or that I bought because I loved them. Why I am mentioning that? everything I own is vintage inspired hence everything I own would look nice with my feed.

Product shots

My product photos follow the same steps: I choose an inspirational photo, choose a product, choose product that will match with the product and create my set up. I always make sure that are brown toned props and gold accessories/props. I also love to texture to my photos. In the photo above, you can see I added a wooden tray, jeans and a magazine.

How I take and edit my Instagram photos

Editing – VSCO

If I don’t have any light or shadows to fix, I directly go to VSCO. If you don’t know this app, it’s the best app for editing in my opinion. You have so much control over everything and on top of that, you have amazing presets. I edit my photos the same, except maybe for my selfies, where I have to show a makeup look.

First of all, I add the filter “M5” and bring it down to 8.5 or 7.5 [depending on how warm the photo is]. For selfies, I bring it down to 3.0. Because, I want the natural colors of the makeup to show.

Second of all, I bring the exposure to 1.0. Sometimes even higher. Again, depending on how light or dark the photo is.

Third of all, I bring the saturation up to 2.1, to make the colors more vibrant.

 

Next, I bring the tone of highlights to 2.2.

Then, I bring the temperature of the white balance to 1.7, to make the photo look warmer in a more natural way. White balance fixes the whites in the photos.

 

Then, I fix the skin tone and bring down to 1.4 because I want to bring back my skin tone to a more natural and warm tone.

 

 

Finally, I play with the grain. I usually put it up to 4.0 for photos of me posing. However, I don’t use the grain on my selfies or else, the makeup look won’t be clear enough.

That’s it for today and how I take and edit my Instagram photos. I hope you enjoyed reading this post and if you did, don’t forget to give it a ‘like’ and to follow my blog.

xx

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