Instagram tips, tricks and how-to guides are all over the internet especially since the app re-jiggered a few things re: how they work. We’re self-confessed Instagram fanatics (is it obvious?). What we do is visual, aspirational and involves lifestyle; plus in this day and age (wow, that makes us sound old) it’s perfect as it’s quick and accessible for everyone. People respond a heck of a lot quicker to an image than they do text, which as two English grads is a somewhat sacrilegious thing to realise). Anyway, we receive a ridiculous amount of emails and comments from people asking how we edit our Instagram photos for our feed. It’s getting harder and harder to reply to each individually so because we’re super nice people, we thought we’d share some of our Instagram tips and tricks!
Instagram tips and tricks!
01: Find your style
Instagram is both a hard thing to grasp and an easy thing. Oh the contradictories. We spot a lot of accounts that don’t have a strong and flowing aesthetic. One of the quickest of Instagram tips to implement is consistency, quality and style - three important things you’ll need for your account. Keep your lighting, props, colour and theme consistent. Make sure that the image quality is always top notch with the help of high resolution images, perfect light and interesting photographic angles. Finally, style is everything. You want to hit people with a visual they remember so find your personality and style quick and develop it well.
If this is something that baffles you still then just look around at accounts and photography you like. Make a private board on Pinterest and just collect images and styling you adore. If you’re focusing your Instagram on your brand or company then remember to keep this in mind. Make sure that everything matches and makes sense. Our logo and our cake designs encapsulate parties, fun and glamorous aspects of nature so our photography reflects this.
02: Quality over quantity
We can’t stress how important it is to invest in a good DSLR camera. One of our first Instagram tips on this topic is to shop around and do your research! You can get away with iPhone pics every so often and we love ours. 12MP in a small smartphone? Yes please! For flexibility, however, we always snap with our Nikon DSLR and a 50mm lens. We can then get in super close, experiment with slight angles, and get an amazing depth of field. We also then have every image in hi-res for any magazine features. Personally, whilst we have a lot of lenses we only really use our 50mm. It’s the perfect all-rounder and it lets in an incredible amount of light when shooting. Another bit of advice we can offer is to force yourself to shoot everything manually. We did this to the point where anything automatic just annoys us. Don’t get lazy and rely on auto functions.
You should also shoot everything in RAW file only - one of those Instagram tips for the serious ‘grammer. This means that you will have the highest quality image as your original file. If you need JPG or PNG then you can edit and convert the file types later. For shooting RAW images you’ll need a heck of a lot of space on your computer. To counteract this make sure to invest in a good external hard drive. This Toshiba 1T external hard drive for Macs is what we use, but you can also get it in PC / non-Mac version.
Nikon DSLR D3200 camera (body only)
Nikon 50mm 1.8 lens (for Nikon cameras only)
03: Editing isn’t just for the pros
Editing your Instagram images is pretty essential. You can save a dull or otherwise uninspiring shot with just a few adjustments. If you’re not very computer savvy then VSCO is an amazing image editing app you can download for your iPhone, iPad or even android! It has some fantastic filters free and available for purchase - all evoking gorgeous film quality looks. Perhaps the most popular (and our firm favourite) is HB1. Using an app also takes out the task of getting to know various pro software too which can take its time.
For the more advanced if you aren’t using Lightroom then get it! It’s going to help you age a lot slower. OK maybe not, but it will shave off hours of work and stress which do contribute to aging. We purchase both Adobe Photoshop and Lightroom as part of a monthly bundle for under £9 a month called ‘Creative Cloud’. This means there’s no huge one off fee and you get all the updates without paying anything extra. Anyway, Lightroom is perfect. It does so many different tasks from importing RAW images, mass re-naming files and editing bulk photographs, BUT the best part is that you can create (or buy) all your own ‘filters’ or pre-sets to use on images. To non-photography nerds this may not sound impressive, but it takes out having to edit every image from memory. No more … “Hmmmm was my contrast level plus or minus 35 on the last image?” etc etc. Way back in the day before Lightroom saved our lives we had notes full of adjustment levels (exposure, contrast, vibrance, shadow vs highlight) and what type of image they’d work best for that we would manually implement. Phew.
04: Plan, plan, plan
Life gets busy and it’s hard to find a spare hour or more to just sit and edit, tag and hashtag every image right when it’s the best time to post. 95% of our Instagram posts are pre-scheduled. It’s just easier that way and it takes a lot of stress out of the day. We use Planoly to plan every Insta post out as well as make sure our overall feed looks good (we’ll discuss this in the next point).
Another part of planning is to know when you should be posting. For this you’ll need an Instagram analytics app. Recently, Instagram enabled a feature for users to switch their profile to a business account that also gathers basic stats. For more in depth readings we’d recommend Iconosquare. It used to be completely free back in the day, but after a free trial you need to pay up. With that in mind it’s worth the money.
For planning here’s one of THE single best Instagram tips that we use on our Apple devices. It’s called ‘text shortcuts;. Basically, if you use a lot of the same hashtags in your posts then this will be amazing. If you don’t know about it already that is. What does it do / what is it? It replaces a keyword that you assign with an entire phrase, paragraph or in this case a block full of hashtags! Go to settings > general >keyboard > text replacement. Once you’re there tap on the + in the top right corner and in the ‘phrase’ section type in all your hashtags that can relate to a specific post then in ‘shortcut’ type the word or a single hashtag you’d use that relates to the phrase (or group of tags). So on our iPads and iPhone we have a few… one being ‘#cupcakes’ which will bring up and replace it with… ‘#cake #tooprettytoeat #like #love #follow #bakery #popular #dessert #cupcakes #cupcakesofinstagram’ etc. Time saver, eh?
05: Make that feed gorgeous
When people visit an Instagram account they take only a few seconds to decide what you are, if you’re interesting and if they want to follow you. With this in mind it’s pretty understandable that you need to make an impression. Be coherent and obvious in what you do. We are a bakery so our feed is filled to the brim with macarons, cupcakes, cookies and cake. Don’t bog down your account with images of your pets, kids, pyjamas or shopping sprees. Even if your Instagram is personal or for a blog find focus and stick to related subject matter. Every so often it’s OK to reveal something a little different such as your world desk, stylish planners etc, but generally stay close to what you’re account is about.
As well as keeping your Instagram relevant you need to plan each image in relation to where it will appear on your feed. Planoly comes in so handy for this. It shows a faux mock-up of your feed to the left hand side so you can move unscheduled images around to see how they look. Try to space out images that seem a little too similar amidst others. This is one of those Instagram tips that might seem silly, but next time you visit an account look at their initial feed and see what you feel and like (or dislike) about it.
Our Instagram tips and step-by-step guide to how we work…
Now here’s a breakdown of what we do, how we do it and why. You don’t necessarily have to work the exact same way. We’re pretty sure that a lot of people don’t edit images twice the way we do, but this is what works for us!
Step 01:
Set-up and style! We shoot on a mahogany table next to a huge window (northwest facing as we feel like we get the best light there especially at around 11am - this depends on your location though so if you’re down a narrow street where buildings will cast shadows try find the best spot for you), but we like lots of extra light so we iron fresh white cotton tablecloths that we drape over the table. We tend to double the tablecloth over so it’s a thicker white and none of the dark wood of the table can be seen. Over this we then style our plates, florals and props. One of our top Instagram tips is whatever your style keep things clean, elegant and simple. We like sleek pieces by Wedgwood (keep it elegant and white), cutlery from West Elm and sometimes more fun items by Bombay Duck. For our shots we don’t like things over cluttered as the focus needs to be on the cake/macarons/etc. Once we’re ready we open the curtains so a lot of light can flood in.
For the darker months when most days are overcast or when the nights set in faster you’re going to need some good lighting. We use this professional photography lighting kit to shoot. You can use two, but we generally only use one light as it casts some good shadows and helps create a more contrast look.
Step 02:
Now it’s time to snap! We use a Nikon D5000 (for some reason this model doesn’t work with some auto-focus lenses, but we don’t mind at all) with a 50mm 1.8 lens and we use them 100% manually. No auto-focus and no auto-settings. We set our white balance in the settings, do a test shot, adjust our aperture and shutter speed. We repeat the process until we’ve got the exposure and look we want.
Step 03:
While photographing we try to take as many shots as we can with one set-up before tweaking it slightly (we may add or take away florals or even change plates etc). It helps to have lots of images just incase some come out a little blurred (it’s easier to see this on a larger computer screen) or you need some extra content during down time. It’s OK if it looks like lots of images are the same; even a slight change of angle, distance or light can create a different feel.
Step 04:
When we’re done we import all our RAW files into Lightroom and begin the selecting and editing process! We have lots of different pre-sets that we re-use, but as a general rule we up the exposure slightly, tone the saturation down on oranges and blues, up the contrast a little, sharpen the images a tiny amount, and add both whites and highlights.
Step 05:
Once our raw images have been edited, named and converted in JPG files we then upload them to Dropbox.
Step 06:
Once they’ve been uploaded we then download them to our iPhone or iPad and second edit them with the VSCO filter ‘HB1’ before saving them (along with lots of snaps of plants, gardens and historic houses…). They’re then uploaded to Planoly once re-edited.
Step 07:
Once they’re in Planoly it’s time to schedule them according to your best times to post, add hashtags, a description and you’re all set! Voila! Instagram tips a-go go!
There you have it! All the top tips we can think to offer plus a little sneaky peek into how we set-up, shoot, edit and schedule all our Instagram images. How we update our feed may seem long-winded and maybe finicky to a few, but it’s how we like to work. Social media and more specifically Instagram is a big deal these days so it makes sense to take it seriously. Back in the day we’d update and put an image of our work up once a week and even then it’d be grabbed from our blog and tweaked with a Insta filter. The very thought still makes us hang our head in shame to this day! Since then we’ve established our own workflow and it’s pretty flattering when people tell us how much they love our feed. SO… how nice is it of us to share our top Instagram tips?
