In honor of the famous Starbucks Red Cup being in season, I wanted to take a moment to do a little Instagram photo editing session for you all! This doesn’t necessarily pertain to photographers, but it can be extremely beneficial to all other vendors. If you are using Instagram to promote your business, or to showcase your branding, I think you’ll find this photography tutorial to be very useful!

I might have been a little more excited about seasonal items being available than I should be, considering this poor Arizonian is still stuck in the 70 degree weather. I shouldn’t be complaining, people literally travel all the way out to our beautiful state to hibernate for the winter, I mean.. enjoy Spring weather for those colder states.

I want to start by sharing my photos with my actual camera gear, edited in Photoshop Camera RAW:

 

Now for the Instagram Photo Editing:

I like to start with the brightness, because I feel like my phone takes photos darker than I would prefer. For this, I set the brightness level to 21.

 

Now for contrast!! I absolutely love adding a nice contrast to my images! Because I want to achieve a really bold contrast in this photo, I set my contrast level to around 82.

 

Let’s talk focal point! We want something that will bring a stronger attention to the main focus of your image. On Instagram, they call this a Tilt Shift, and it’s the closest thing you can do on this app to make an image look as if it was shot with a manual camera on a lower aperture setting. I’ll go over apertures in another post! Depending on the image, and what story I’m trying to tell with the photo, I’ll use either radial or linear. There’s a lot more that goes into that, but I’ll keep it simple for today!

 

I picked Radial Tilt Shift for my Instagram edit because I wanted my main focus to be on the Starbucks ornament in the photo. If I did Linear, the top of the cup would have a portion in focus, along with the bottom of the cup, and that isn’t what I wanted. If I had Linear (landscaped) It would have caught some of the coffee sleeve. You can also make the shift area smaller or bigger depending on how much of the non-shaded area you want to have in focus!

Here’s how I set my focus:

 

I did a little bit of altering in the highlights, shadows, and vignette, but I wanted to give you a basic tutorial on how to edit your images with Instagram. It really comes down to each person’s personal style of editing! 🙂

Another little tip, incase you didn’t already know this, you can tap and hold your finger on the image to see what the photo looked like prior to your edit. If you’re in the main editing screen it will show the full before and after, but if you’re in a particular section it’ll only show that specific thing, such as highlights or contrast level before and afters.

 

Now for a little before and after:

It doesn’t beat the professional grade images, but if you’re having a hard time making your instagram photos pop, and you aren’t a photographer, this should help you stand out a little more!

 

I hope you found this tutorial to be useful! I’ll be planning to do a tutorial once a month or more! For each tutorial I do, I’ll be hosting a small giveaway! To enter, either send me an email with your before and after image, tag me on instagram (@atravelersheartphoto), or share on my facebook page! I need to see a before and after of the photo you edited each time to have a chance at winning. This can be a simple phone screen shot, it doesn’t have to be anything fancy! 😀

 

This month’s theme is RED!! Take what I’ve shared with you, and incorporate the photo with something related to the color red. Let your imagination run wild, or just take one of your Red Cup from Starbucks. 😉

The deadline to submit your photo will be 11/17/2016! I’ll draw a name at random, and the winner will receive a $5 Starbucks gift card! (or to a local coffee shop in the PHX area!)

<3

xoxo, Melissa