Creating Visually Appealing Content on Instagram

So… up to this point, we’ve established your target audience, your voice, the kinds of content you can create and how to engage your followers. The only thing left to talk about is the photos themselves!

Establish Your Style

What kind of photos do you like? This is your page, so you should like it! Think about the kinds of images that strike you, what do you find visually appealing? Imitate that in your own photo taking! Ask yourself what you find to be aesthetically pleasing and integrate that into your posts.

Consistency

I cannot stress enough how important this is. Whether your style leans towards high-saturation photos, black and white snaps, busy pictures or simple shots, once you pick it, you’ve got to stick with it! Creating a visually appealing page is what will draw your audience in, then your content is what will make them stay.

Use Similar Colours

Create an appealing look by having a similar colour theme.

Crop Photos the Same Way

This gives your feed a very uniform look.

Use the Same Filter

Using the same filter will give your images a similar look, whether that be intense, pale, high contrast, etc.. To go beyond even the Instagram filters available, take a look at some of these other apps.

VSCOCAM

VSCOCAM is an editing tool outside of Instagram that can alter shadows, saturation, contrast and the like, as well as add filters. However, it’s speciality is taking dark and shadowy images and making them look naturally lighter.

Afterlight

This tool has all the editing power of Instagram, with the special ability of blending together your favourite filters to create an immeasurable number of options for you to choose from.

Snapseed

What makes Snapseed unique is it’s a touch-based app that allows users to select objects or areas of a photo to edit separately.

For a complete list of helpful editing apps, check out this awesome list compiled by Jumper Media.

and finally…

Editing Best Practices

Brightness

One of the most powerful tools in your editing arsenal, upping your brightness can create a nice, crisp look in photos, and unveil details that would otherwise be hidden. It’s great for exposing textures and colour.

Contrast

Upping the contrast will make objects in your picture pop against the background. Whether your photo is black and white or in colour, it creates a certain distance between the focal point and the background that is very appealing.

Saturation

When posting brightly coloured photos, saturation is the key to giving those tones an extra punch! Contrastingly, if you like your photos to maintain a more neutral look, toning down the saturation gives you the option of posting typically brighter photos while still maintaining your theme.

Sharpening

While you should always be striving to take higher quality photos, adjusting the sharpness (sparingly) can make photos appear crisper.

Highlights and Shadows

Sometimes when you enhance the contrast and brightness of a photo, you can lose some of the detail, lowering highlights and decreasing shadows can enhance the smaller features of a photo.