Keep reading to know more photo editing trends on Instagram.
The monochrome photo
Images that stick to a single color family look clean and crisp on the feed, standing out like towering Rothkos in a crowded art gallery.
This monochrome look is dramatic and interesting. It makes a straightforward product photo have an editorial feel.
And pops of bold color or a bright background stands out in the Instagram feed, which is exactly what you want to do.
Different colors evoke specific moods and emotions: red is energetic, orange is happy, purple is creative, pink is romantic. Choose a color that reflects how you want your audience to feel about your brand.
To enhance your images, clean up distractions like dirt or shadows from your backdrop with an app like Touch Retouch. It helps you remove unwanted objects from your photos while retaining a natural look.
A more multipurpose tool like Adobe Photoshop Express can also help you dial up the saturation of your featured tones while keeping your photo balanced and beautiful. Or you can try Darkroom, another feature-heavy photo app for adjusting the colors in your photos.
The neon edit
One of the hot hot photo editing trends on Instagram is a trend with a retro kick is neon, glowing brightly all over Instagram. Also known by a sexier nickname, it seems like everyone is bathed in neon light these days.
Projecting an active and energetic mood. It’s suitable for cinematic shots, dramatic portraits, or fitness brands.
You can achieve this sultry vibe through your photo set-up, by positioning pink and blue lights on either side of your subject. But an even easier method is through the aptly-named Neon app, full of colorful filters.
The artful still life
Not every photo on your Instagram feed needs to be a product shot, or even directly related to your brand. You can build your following and engage your audience through beautiful photos and videos that create a mood, develop your aesthetic, or offer visual inspiration.
Glossier built an enormous following even before they launched their first product by treating their Instagram account like a mood board, posting over 125 photos of dreamy landscapes and objects in their signature pink palette. They still excel at the art of the still life:
In 2020, stunning your audience with arresting images is a way to cut through the noise. Instagram users are overloaded by content; a dreamy photo is a great palate cleanser. If you can make your product shots look like art, all the better:
Good lighting is the foundation of an artful still life. But skillful editing takes it to the next level. Pixlr is an easy photo-editing app with a ton of pre-sets and tools like Color Splash, which enhance the featured colors in your photo to striking effect.
Apollo is another great photo editing app for tweaking the lighting of your images, to create dramatic shadows or compensate for limited natural light.
Or try an app like AfterFocus, which lets you gently blur the background of your shot to emphasize your subject.
Creativity pays off here—download a few new tools and play around!
The colorful collage
You can always count on Gen Z to put a twist on an Instagram trend, and 2020 is no different. This year, teens have taken up a wholesome hobby: creating collages to celebrate high school graduation and sharing virtual yearbooks on Instagram.
Collages started popping up on Instagram over the past few years, and this trend shows no signs of disappearing.
Combining photos, illustrations and text, collages bring a friendly, casual vibe to your Instagram posts. They’re a great way to add variety to your feed, enhance word-based images, and add fun and creativity to your account.
There are a ton of apps for creating fun collages. Canva is one of our favorites: it’s easy to use and has a fantastic free version, though you can pay for expanded options. Unfold is another popular option, with plenty of gorgeous templates. Or try out Adobe Spark, which is simple, clean and optimized for social.
The flash-on photo
After testing out hiding the number of likes on posts, Instagram is moving to make likes private across the platform as part of their strategy to make the platform a more connected, community-driven place.
Without each post displaying its relative popularity, many influencers and brands feel freer to experiment with their posts, sharing content that’s interesting and genuine rather than what they think will perform best.
If you want to show off your authentic and experimental side, try playing with flash effects. They’re crisp and high-focus, but not polished. Instead, they tend to look a bit gritty and raw, with lots of grain and texture. They make portraits more interesting, and lend a sharp editorial vibe to product shots.
To achieve this effect without any extra equipment, try David’s Disposable, an app that lets you emulate the disposable camera flash effect with your smartphone. For more precision, invest in an external flash unit and sync it to your iPhone camera with a device like Tric. This will give you more control and quality than just using the built-in flash on your iPhone.
Or you can always use a real DSLR and upload your images to Instagram from there. (We won’t tell anyone!)
Ready to bring your photos into the next decade? Remember, trends are supposed to be fun— if you enjoy the content you’re creating, chances are your audience will too.