My Instagram Photography Editing Flow
One of the hardest things when picking up a new craft is knowing whether there’s a better way of doing it compared to what you’re used to. Whether you’ve just picked up photography and want to learn how to edit photos but have no idea where to start, or you’ve been editing photos for a while but want to know how other people do it, this guide might be for you!
What follows is my personal process of editing photos (you can check out my Instagram page!) So let’s get to it! 📸
Overview
Photo editing for me broadly falls into the following steps:
- Delete unusable photos: Let’s be honest, a lot of photos end up blurry or just not very appealing. I sometimes go over my photos first and delete those that I know I’ll never use. Be careful not to delete something that you might later find useful, but also be honest with yourself. If it’s beyond salvaging, delete it. Storage space isn’t free!
- Initial screening: You should be left with a lot of okay photos, and a subset of good photos. At this stage I separate the good photos from the rest.
Something to try is to open your photos in gallery view, so that they’re all laid out in a grid, and see if anything catches your eye. This way it’s easier to separate bad contrast/composition from what truly stands out.
- Final screening: At this stage, you should have narrowed your photos down to 5–20% of your best ones. That’s still a lot of photos, and you really want to put your best work forward. Choose your most favourite ones to be edited and shared. Any photo that didn’t make the cut can be reviewed later: maybe you’ll find something special about a photo that you haven’t previously noticed!
- Editing: Once you’ve identified your best pictures, take some time to edit them before sharing. Do the basics (contrast, saturation, composition), but also consider what you want your audience to feel. This is the time to get creative and make the photo something truly special! You may wish to leave cropping for later — for example, Instagram allows you to crop images on upload, and has some aspect ratio limitations that you may not realise before submitting. I suggest that you don’t go overboard with contrast and saturation. Cranking these up may look appealing at first, but making all your pictures candy-coloured detracts from realism. Feel free to try it out, but over-saturation is a common beginner mistake that you should keep in mind. That said, don’t be afraid to add some colour if you want to!
- Sharing: It’s finally time to share your work with the world! Upload it, and revel in success! If you’re on Instagram, make sure to add a good selection of relevant hashtags to make it easier for people to find your image. If you want to see metrics about your post, you can also switch your Instagram account type.
- Backup: Last but not least, make sure to back up your photos somewhere safe. Keep in mind that hard drives often fail, and it may be a good idea to have a backup in the cloud in case something happens to your computer.
Here is an illustration of my flow, but yours may differ depending on your devices and preferences!
Getting photos off your camera
There’s a good chance that your camera uses an SD card to store photos. I found that using a cheap SD card adapter is a good way to easily transfer photos to your computer or iPad. This is the one I have, and the fact that it has USB-C on one end makes it really easy to transfer photos to my iPad just by plugging it in and opening the Photos app. I do most of my photo editing on my iPad, but also transfer photos to my PC as a backup.
Screening photos
On your computer
I like to use RawTherapee to edit and filter photos on my PC. You can give each photo a rating, give it a colour, or delete it outright. It’s free, and you can also use it to edit your photos! If you have Lightroom, you can use that instead.
On your iPad
This is where I usually screen and edit my pictures. I use BestPhotos, which introduces a Tinder-like approach of swiping left or right to choose photos you like. It makes it easy to sort through hundreds of photos and choose the best ones.
Editing
I like using Affinity Photo to edit my pictures. I found it to be very intuitive and simple while remaining powerful, and very affordable compared to Lightroom. When you import a photo, it enters develop mode, and I like going through all the sliders in a sequential manner — starting with exposure and contrast adjustments all the way up to noise reduction.
When editing on PC, I like using either Affinity Photo or RawTherapee. The latter also allows you to screen photos, and has a lot of powerful features such as LAB adjustments, which allow you to easily turn an image greyscale in a way that matches human perception. I also enjoyed using Capture One Pro, though the cost is much greater than the other apps mentioned here.
Sharing
To share the picture, you must first export it from your editing program of choice. To export from Affinity photo on the iPad, you can tap Export, tweak the image resolution (I lower mine to something reasonable), and make sure to change the Resample option from Bilinear to Lanczos as that gives better quality.
Unfortunately, Instagram didn’t bother to make a decent version of their app for PC/iPad, so to share the image on Instagram I have to send it to my phone first. To do this I use the Send Anywhere app, which I found to be an excellent way to quickly send photos to my phone without having to email them to myself.
Backups
It’s a great idea to have backups of your photos, as hard drives and SD cards are prone to failure.
I back up my photos on two hard drives using a RAID 1 configuration, which means that the images are saved onto two hard drives at the same time. If one drive fails, then the images can still be recovered. Windows allows you to easily set up RAID 1 if you have multiple hard drives. I wouldn’t recommend storing your images on a single hard drive, as they can fail without warning.
If the photos are important to you, you should also save them remotely to cloud storage. Options include Dropbox, Google Drive, Google Photos, or AWS Glacier if you’re techy. All of these cost a monthly fee, but are a good option if you want to make sure that your photos are never lost.
Conclusion
Congratulations, you did it! You narrowed down your best photos, uploaded them, safely backed them up, and are now a billionaire and world-famous photographer extraordinaire 💁. I hope that you found this article helpful.
Keep on creating, and have a great day!
