Transcripts
1. Introduction / What You Will Learn: What is going on, guys? My name is Dale McManus, and I am here to show you how to get a cohesive Instagram feed. Because maybe even scrolling through Instagram, and you have seen some really professional accounts that had these amazing photos that are edited with this nice consistent look to every single one, and it makes up this really cohesive feed. I am going to show you everything that you need to know to make this happen. We are going to talk about choosing colors and which colors are going to be right for you and your pictures. We are going to talk about the overall mood and the style that you want for your Instagram feed. We will also cover custom layouts and editing your photos like a professional using an app called Lightroom. It is the number one rated photo editing software in the world, and it is so simple to use. I am going to show you how to create custom presets that you can add to your photos, as well as using another program to preview your Instagram feed before actually uploading the photos and a few other extra features for running your Instagram like a pro. Having a cohesive feed will make your Instagram look a lot more professional, which could also help you increase your followers. It can help you build your personal brand or your business brand. It can even give you a better eye for photography and make you a much better photo editor. I am going to show you how to do it in just four simple steps. Without further ado, My name is Dale McManus, and I am a professional photographer. Whenever you are ready, let us jump right in and get this started.
2. Step #1 Choose a Filter Style: Step Number 1 is to choose a filter style. This is not to be confused with choosing a color scheme, which we will get to next. In order to understand filter style, you have to understand the three characteristics of color first. Color is made up of three parts, hue, saturation, and lightness. Hue refers to the general tone of color itself, such as red, yellow, green, blue, purple, etc. Saturation refers to the intensity of that tone of color, aka, how colorful and vibrant it is, or how dull and colorless it is. It's just how much color is being applied. Lastly, lightness refers to how bright or how dark that tone of color is. Otherwise, thought of as how much white is added to that color, or how much black is added to that color. Getting back to choosing your filter style, the best way to think of it is to remove the hue completely from the picture, and just focus on the saturation and the lightness. That means filter style, you're really just focusing on how white or bright you want your Instagram feed to be, or how dark you want it to be, as well as how much color that you want in it. Do you want a very saturated or do you want desaturated colors? Pastel colors fit into this category. Or do you just want it to look natural? There are lots of different styles. If you're not sure which one to choose, I do have a two-step fix for that. Let's talk about that. Number 1 is to answer this question. What do you spend most of your leisure time on? Answering this question will help you figure out a little bit more about who you are, and where you spend your time, and what you decide to photograph. Because the backgrounds and the subjects in your photos are going to help us determine which of these styles is going to work best for you. Let me explain. If you spend most of your time going to music festivals with friends, then you're probably going to want to go with more of a dark and contrasty look. This is because a lot of your photos are going to be taken at night. But if you're somebody that likes to spend most of their time on the slopes, say skiing or snowboarding, then you're going to want more of a white, or a bright filter style, because the environment that you're in is covered in snow, which is white and bright. It's very fitting. Now, if you're a mother that likes to spend most of her time with her kids, then maybe you want more of a soft or a vintage look to yours with, lighter color tones. Now, I'm not saying that just because you live one lifestyle that you can't choose a different filter style or category. All I'm saying is that it will match much better. If you spend a lot of time on the slopes, you might not want to go for a darker and contrasty look, because you're in the snow all the time, and snow is white and it's bright. Those are going to conflict. Try to adopt a filter style that matches your lifestyle. For instance, if I'm not going to the grocery store or brushing my teeth, or working, or doing the other normal life necessities, I'm spending my leisure time traveling. I loved to travel, and I spend a lot of time in the sun and the sky outdoors. Naturally, I went for more of a natural look. I would even say it's more of a brighter look. Obviously, I have a lot of orange and blue tones in mind. But we're also going to talk about that in the next lesson and why I chose that. Now, tip Number 2 for finding the perfect filter style is to find one Instagram account that you really admire and you really relate to, and try to pay attention in the general mood of their account. It's best to pick an account that's posting photos that are in the same environment that you'd like to take your photos in. Are they bright and contrasty? Or are they bright and soft? Or are they dark and moody and desaturated? Or are they dark and very saturated? You can see how saturation and lightness really affect the overall mood of your Instagram. Let's move on to Step 2 and talk about choosing colors.
3. Step #2 Choose a Color Scheme: Step number two is to choose a color scheme. Choosing a color scheme is important because it's like having your own custom signature on all of your photos. Your ultimate goal is that somebody is going to be scrolling through Instagram and then they're going to come across your photo and within the first nanosecond they're going to know that that photo belongs to you, before ever even looking at who posted it. Because it's got your color scheme to it. We live in a world where we are flooded with new information, more and more every single day, so a picture is going to stand out a lot more than small 12 point text. You're probably wondering, why are you telling me this? Why is this important? Well, truth be told, when I scroll through Instagram it looks something like this, swipe, stop, swipe, stop, swipe, stop. That's how I scroll through Instagram. I only stop when I see a picture that really catches my eye. I tend to breeze right over the text. The reason that we want to choose a consistent color scheme is because we want somebody to swipe your image into view and immediately know that it's yours right away. Once they recognize that this is your photo, they're a little bit more likely to go read your caption and check out what you're doing. But if it was somebody else's photo that didn't have a consistent look, I might just say, "Yap, cool photo", and then slide it right away without thinking about it. But people associate your color scheme with what you're doing with your life on Instagram. The best way to choose a color scheme is to pick 1-3 main colors. You can have an all blue scheme if you want, or you can do a blue and a green color scheme and mix and match them, or you could do blue, green, and red. The whole point is that you're staying consistent with this throughout all of your posting. Not every photo has to have all three colors in it, as long as it's one of these three. You might ask, well, how do I know which colors to pick? Which colors are going to be best for me? Well, all you want to do is pay attention to the background of your current photos. What type of setting are you taking most of your photos in? Is it indoors or is it outdoors? What time of day is it? Are there lots of trees? Is there a lot of blue sky? Maybe there's some architecture. The elements that make up the background of your current photos are what's going to determine what colors that you should probably pick. Take my friend Domaprile for instance, he takes fantastic photos and he does not already have a consistent feed. This is why I'm using him as an example. If we want to choose a color scheme for him we should pay attention to his photos. Most of them are outdoors during midday. He does have some night shots and some sunset shots mixed in with these, but I would say that the bulk is outdoors around midday. Blue is a color that he should probably think about using from now on, because it shows up fairly often in his photos. There's also a lot of trees in his photos, so I would say the green would be a pretty safe bet as well. The goal is to figure out which colors show up the strongest in your current feed so that your future feed will have a more consistent look. It's really just a game of majority colors. What colors show up more than all the others? If Dom decided that he wanted to use red as one of his colors he really would have a hard time posting all of these awesome outdoor shots that he really likes so much because red doesn't really show up in them a lot. Let's assume that Dom wants to go for a blue and a green look. Does this mean that he can only do just this tone of green or just this tone of blue? Absolutely not. He could easily take this dark blue in all of his photos and he can turn it into more of a cyan color, which is a mixture of blue and green. So it changes the tone. He could also take the greens in his photos and make them a lot deeper green, make it more foresty looking. The way that he's going to do that is by using Lightroom, which I will teach you a few lessons from now. Let me show you a few more examples of cohesive feeds and what colors that they chose. This is Sean Dalton's account. He's actually a fellow top teacher here on Skillshare, and he's got courses all based around Instagram and photography, and they're fantastic. He's got one that's actually called Becoming an Instagram Influencer. Check him out some time. But Sean has a dark and moody filter style and his main colors are dark, desaturated green, and a dark cyan blue, and a tinge of brown. He has plenty of other colors that are splashed in here and there, but these three are his main colors and they remain consistent throughout his entire Instagram. All the greens are the same shade of green, all of the blues are the same shade of cyan. His Instagram is very impressive. Let me show you another one. This is Leslie Green's Instagram. I just started following Leslie recently because I love the way that she had this consistent pink vibe going on, and she pulls it off with a mix of all different types of photos. She has outdoor shots mixed in with selfies with friends, mixed in with typography, and there's even a photo of ice cream from the freezer section, just because it has pink in it and it works really well. I really wanted to show her account off because you don't need to just take one type of photo, it doesn't just have to be outdoor shots, it could be anything as long as you're using a consistent filter. Which again, I'm going to show you how to make in some of the following lessons. Try analyzing your own photos, see what's in the background of your photos, and try to come up with 1-3 colors. Just keep them in the back of your mind for later because we're going to need them. If you're ready for step three, let's do it.
4. Step #3 Choose a Tile Layout: Step number three is to choose a tile layout. A tile layout is simply just the order of the squares in your Instagram feed, and however creative that you want to be with them. This is just an extra step of creativity for those of you that want to post more than just photos. Maybe you want to post some quotes as well. It's easier to explain if I just show you some examples. First you've got The Every Other, and the every other is simply just a photo and then a quote, and a photo and then a quote, every other tile. It doesn't have to just be quotes, you can tile every other photo to be a product photo if you're running a Instagram business account. It could be a product photo and then a regular photo, and then a new product photo and then a regular photo. It's really just posting a new type of content every other photo. Next you have the rows, and the rows is simply just three pictures and then three quotes, and then three pictures and three quotes. Like I said earlier, it doesn't just have to be quotes. It could just be three types of content, then three different types of content, and this is so that it forms all of these perfect rows along your Instagram feed. Now the thing about this is that you might have to post three photos at a time, otherwise, you'll break those rows up If you just post one or two. There are some limitations to think about with choosing your tile layout. Another example is the columns. It's simply the same as the rows except it's straight up and down. You've got photos on either side, maybe quotes in the middle or vice versa. Then of course you've got the traditional method where you just post whatever you want when you want, which is my favorite because I'm not limited to how many posts I need to make in a day or what I'm allowed to post, I can just post whatever inspires me in the moment. But there are plenty of people, especially those that are running small business accounts or the running lifestyle brands that do have other types of content besides just photos that they want to throw into their Instagram and you might benefit from a creative layout. With that said, let's move on to step number four.
5. Step #4: Edit Your Photos (Introduction): Step number four is to edit your photos. We've chosen a filter style, which is the general theme and the mood of our Instagram feed. We've chosen a color scheme, we've chosen a tile layout, and now we're going to get to the good part which is editing our photos so that it fits into that cohesive feed. That is coming up in the next couple of lessons. We're actually going to be editing a batch of photos because we want to test out a group of photos in a preview grid so that we can see what it looks like before actually putting it on our Instagram. In the very next lesson after this one, I'm going to be doing a Lightroom CC tutorial. If you've already taken my iPhone photography course, or maybe you already know Lightroom, you are welcome to skip that lesson and go on to the one following it. Cool. Head on to the next lesson and let's get started.
6. Lightroom CC Tutorial: Now I'm going to show you how to use Lightroom CC, to edit your photos and make them beautiful. As I said before, if you already know how to use Lightroom, you can skip to the next lesson which is creating custom presets for Instagram. But for this, I'm going to show you how to download it and use it. Let's go ahead and download it now. If you have an iPhone, just go to the App Store. If you have an Android, it's probably Google Play. What you want to do is type in Lightroom into the search bar. Then you'll see it here. It says Adobe Lightroom CC. Mine says open because I actually already have it. Yours will say something like get and what you can do is just download that. Then once it's done downloading, just open it. It will ask you to sign in. You can do this through Facebook or you can create a free account if you want. Then once you're done with that, it'll take you to a page that looks something like this. In order to import a photo, all you have to do is touch this little button in the bottom right, looks like a photo with a plus sign. Grab that and let's just throw any random photo in here. This is from my camera album. Lightroom is a lot easier to use than it may look at first. First simply you've got the Crop button and most people have cropped the image before, all you have to do is just drag in and you can crop the image whichever way that you want. It's also got this rotating tool underneath. If your photo was taken at an angle, you can adjust it by using that function. If you'd like to undo anything, there's this little symbol at the top right, that looks like a U-turn symbol, just click that and it will undo any action that you've done. From here we're going to skip over Profiles and Auto at the bottom, and we're going to go straight to the Light tab. From the Light tab, what you can do is just play with the Exposure. Maybe if it was underexposed, you can give it a little bit more exposure. You can play with the Contrast, so you can make it really flat or very punchy. You can play with the Highlights. The highlights are the brightest parts of your image only. If you need to make them even brighter, you can. Then same with the Shadows. The shadows are the darkest parts of your image. You can make them even darker or you can bring out just the shadows. You can see there's a lot of detail left in those shadows. Now the Whites and Blacks are just an extra boost to those shadows and highlights. I don't touch those that often. I mainly focus on highlights and shadows. From here, you can go to the Color tab right next to it. In color, you can play with the Temperature, so you can make it really cold or you can make it really warm. I use this mainly as a counteractive measure. If I get a photo that comes in looking like that, I give it a little bit more blue to counteract it. Then you've also got Vibrance and Saturation, which is just how much color is actually in your image or lack of color, if you so choose. Vibrance is the same thing except it only brings up colors that it thinks needs to be brought up, and it leaves alone the colors that are already very saturated. It's a smart form of saturation. Inside of color, you'll see this MIX tab. If you click on the MIX tab, you can adjust individual colors. I'll show you what I mean. If I select just this blue dot, I can select the hue of that blue. I can change that to be more of a cyan color or more of a purple color, which obviously looks crazy. But you can adjust individual colors. Then you can also adjust the saturation of just that color or lack thereof, and as well as the luminance. This is basically how bright or how dark that one color is. You can do this with every single color in the spectrum. Just click on the Done button. Then next we have the Effects tab. If you click on the Effects tab, you've got this cool function called Clarity. Clarity basically either makes your image very chiseled looking or very soft and dreamlike. It just depends on what your style is. I'd say less is more with this function. I usually give a boost of clarity to somewhere around a 20ish. Dehaze is mainly just used for fog in your scene, so if you've got a lot of fog in a photo, you can get rid of it with Dehaze. Then Vignette just adds a black or a white fade to the corners of your picture. You can adjust some extra settings of the Vignette down below it. Like the feather for instance, how faded or not faded that is, and so on. I just recommend playing with these and see what you can do. These are the three main tabs that I focus on in Lightroom. I really don't touch anything else down here except for the Presets tab, which I'm going to talk about in the very next lesson. Because the presets tab is how are we going to apply a custom look to all of our photos so that we don't have to edit them all from scratch. Once you're done, you can just swipe down on the screen and that'll get rid of that menu. If you just hold your finger down on the screen, that will show you what the image looked like before and what it looks like after. Now, obviously that sky is super cyan colored and it's not actually how I'd edit this photo, but for the sake of the demonstration, we're going to leave it. Now you can just click on the checkmark at the top right, and this will add this to All Photos album. If we go back to that image, we can now save it to our camera album once we're done editing it. In order to do this, just click on this little button up here at the top right. Then you can just go to Save to Camera Roll, and then just click on Maximum available. That was a walk-through of Lightroom. In the next lesson, I'm going to show you how to create a Custom Preset that you can apply to all of your photos to have that nice consistent look. Let's do it.
7. How to Create Custom Presets for Instagram: Now I'm going to show you how to create custom presets in Lightroom so that you can apply these presets to every photo and make the editing process that much faster. It will also ensure that you're going to get that nice cohesive look because you're using the same preset every time. Let me show you what I mean by preset. Go ahead and open up Lightroom, and let's just import a photo and preferably one that has two of the colors that you want to use. I'm going to pick this one because the sky is blue and the lighting is orange. So I want to go with a blue and an orange look. What we're going to do is break this down into four simple steps. First is to edit your photo, second is to turn that edit into a preset, third is to apply that preset to your other photos, and number four is to make adjustments. Number 1 is to edit your photo. Honestly what I do first is I go all the way to the bottom right and go to Presets. This is not to be confused with creating your own. What I'm going to do is select that and just pick a starting point. This is what I talked about with filter style. This is going to determine the overall mood of your photos on your Instagram. I'm inside the Color tab right now, and inside the Color tab you've got all these different options and if you click on the "Color" tab and then you go to creative, you've got all these different other ones that you can do that actually looks a lot like the preset that I use, but that is actually not where I start. I'm going to go back to color, and I'm going to go with this Matte look because I really like those dark shadows and I also like that those blacks are faded looking. I'm going to select Matte to start with, and that's going to determine my filter style. Now I'm going to focus on colors. I'm going to edit this photo to have my colors in it. I'm going to go to the Color tab, and then I'm going to go to the Mix tab and from here I'm going to bring out the blues, so I'll click on "Blue" and I'll make them a little bit more cyan colored, something like that and I'll make them pop a bit. Then I'm going to go to the oranges and I'm going to make the oranges a little bit more saturated and I'll also make the yellows a little bit more orange. I want everything to be orange and also saturate these crazy too. Saturate the yellows and the oranges and we've already got a photo that would look great for my color scheme. Now number 2 is to create the preset. What we're going to do is take the edit we just made and turn it into a preset. What I'm going to do is select the check mark at the top right and that'll just add that to my photos. I'm going to go to All Photos and now that photo is in there, so if you just select it, it'll show up again. We're back to where we were and now instead of that check mark at the top, you're going to see these three buttons. What we want to do is click on the one with the three dots all the way to the top right and then just go down to Create Preset, and then just give it a name. I called it number 1 because what I like to do is create about three of these, each with slightly different settings because sometimes presets look great on some photos and then other photos have different lighting. But what we're going to do is keep all of these checked except for Tools, Optics and Geometry, and then just select the check mark. Cool. Now we've created our preset. Now, step number 3 is to apply it to our other photos. What you can do is bring other photos in here and if you just go all the way down to the bottom right, you can just select Presets. Then from here, just click on the "Color" tab or whatever tabs open for you and then go all the way down to user presets. Then you'll see the preset that you just made in this list. Now all I have to do is touch it and it just applied it to that photo. If you hit the check mark and you hold your finger down on the screen, that's what it used to look like, and that is my new one. I can do the same thing for all of my photos so boom, done, boom, done. If I added that preset now this will bring us to number 4, which is to make adjustments. Not all the time, it's going to look great. For instance, in this photo, the rocks look a little to orange and my shadows in this photo look a little too dark, so all you have to do is make adjustments wherever necessary. I'll go to Color and I'll go to Mix and pick the oranges. Maybe I'll just turn them down a bit. I'll bring him back to normal. Then with the shadows, I'll go to the Light tab, and then maybe I will just bring those shadows up a bit, like that. Now, once you're all done editing your photo, all you have to do is go up to this symbol at the top right, and then just click on save to camera roll, and this will save it to your iPhone's camera roll. What I do is just select "Maximum available" I want the highest quality that I can get. Now just do this process to a whole batch of photos. I recommend about 15, that way we can throw this entire batch of photos into a preview app that allows us to see what our Instagram feed is going to look like before we actually have to put them on Instagram.
8. Preview Your Cohesive Instagram Feed: Now that we've edited all of our photos, we want to add them to an app called preview so that we can see how they're going to look before we actually have to upload them to Instagram. So just go to the App Store and then just type in preview. Then it's the first one at the top, looks like a bunch of colored tiles. Just go ahead and download that, and then whenever it's done, just click on "Open". Then we're just going to skip this tutorial. Now we're going to sign up and it's completely free, so we're just going to click on the "Free button" and then it'll just ask us to agree to the terms and the conditions, we will just agree and then click "Continue". Cool, now we can log in with Instagram. We'll just click on that and then I will put in my Instagram details and then just click on "Login". Then we'll just say, "Not Now," we don't need it to keep our info, and then just put in your e-mail, and then if you don't want them to send you tips and things like that through e-mail, you can just uncheck that. Then just click on "Done". Now it's uploaded all the photos that I currently have uploaded to my Instagram account. Now what we want to do is click on this "Plus" sign up at the top right and then we're going to add some new photos from our library. Just click on the "Library button". Then this will ask for permission to your photos, we'll just say "Okay". Then we'll go to our camera roll and then we'll just select some of the photos that we want to put in. I'm just going to select a whole bunch here at random. Then we'll just click on "Done". Then now that is populating all of those photos that we just selected and obviously I selected a lot of the same ones that I already have on my Instagram, but yours will look a little different. Once those are all done populating, all you have to do is touch on an image and hold for about a second, then that'll allow you to drag that image around wherever you want so you can see how you want to tile certain pictures and so forth. That is mainly how I figure out how I want my Instagram to look. Then I just go grab whichever photo is next to post, and then I post it to Instagram, which I don't really think that I need a tutorial to show you, but I do want to show you a few extra features with the preview app while we're here. Let's say that you want to schedule out a few posts in a row, maybe a batch of photos and they're posted one a day for an entire week. Well, what you can do is just select an image and then just click on this little speech bubble symbol at the bottom right. What you can do is write your caption, let's just write one. Then you can just click on the "Schedule Post" button. What this will do is allow preview to post this photo to Instagram for you at any designated time. You can get a batch of five photos ready to be posted every day for a week and then you can just click on "Confirm". But I do not want to schedule this post, so I'm going to turn that off. In preview, you can create groups of hashtags. If you click on this plus symbol underneath hashtags, this will allow you to create a new group, so we'll say "Add group". Then you just write in all your hashtags. If you're not sure which hashtags are best to use, you can just click on "Find Hashtags". Then I can just type in travel. Then it's going to give me an entire list of awesome travel hashtags that are followed by a lot of people. Then all you have to do is just touch all the ones that you want, and it will add this to that list. Then if you go back, all you have to do is give this a name, so I'll just call it travel hashtags and then click "Done". Cool, now just hit the back arrow up at the top left, and then just click on "Recent" and then go back to groups and it should show up there. Let's say you've got a whole batch of photos scheduled to be posted. If you just click on this symbol up at the top left, that looks like a calendar, this is where all of those photos are going to show up so that you can easily monitor all those posts. That is my process guys. First I added my photos and then I throw them into the preview app to see how they look and then I individually post each photo. But if you want, you can schedule posts out.
9. Final Words: Hi guys, thank you for watching. Thank you for sticking around till the end of the course. That is how to get a cohesive Instagram feed. If you're struggling to get this down perfect, like I said, just try to find that one account that you really admire, you loved their photos, maybe they've got a really cool color scheme going and just try to mimic what they do until you can figure out how to make it your own. It's okay to take similar photos. If somebody's taking very far away shots and then they'd mixing them with close ups and they're out in the forest, try to do that, try to find a foresty area and mimic it. Or maybe they're doing a lot of architecture. What angles are they taking these architecture pictures with? What does the lighting look like? What time of day are they taking these photos in? What you want to do is just mimic all this as closely as you can until you start to get that eye for the photos and then it just starts happening naturally. You'll take a few really good photos in maybe a batch of 20 or 30 not-so-good ones. Honestly, practice, practice, is the way to get good at photography and editing photos doesn't matter. Just practice as much as you can. Before you go guys, if you like this course and you wanted to leave a rating and a review, I will be eternally grateful. Those ratings and reviews help me so much more than you think. Thank you so much for watching and I will see you guys on the next course.
Dale McManus, Photography, Cinematography, Music
