How To Edit Your Instagram Selfie Photos Like a Blogger
Some might say it’s shallow, but it’s natural for people to want to look their best and feel attractive. Instagram is an excellent tool for marketing yourself, whether you’re trying to grow a small business, make new friends, increase your success on dating apps, or make yourself appealing to influencer brand deals. But when everyone you know is posting photos on a daily basis, what can you do to stand out and shine?
You don’t have to edit your selfies to pieces until you’re unrecognizable to accomplish your goals. There are lots of little tips and tricks to improve your Instagram image while still staying, well, you. Here’s what the top influencers and instagram models are doing!
1. Make your skin look healthy
You might not think you’re looking closely at other people’s skin, but it’s actually one of our biggest biological cues. When someone’s skin is smooth, elastic, and has a nice complexion, they look extra healthy, fertile, and young. Most social media stars do some kind of editing to their skin. The important thing is not to overdo it. There’s a fine line between subtly improving your appearance and airbrushing yourself to excess.
The best way to accomplish healthy and natural-looking skin is to make small, light improvements. In Photoshop, zoom into your photo as far as you can go. Look for big zits, acne scars, wrinkles, moles, or hyper-pigmentation. Create a new layer and name it “Blemishes.” Use the eyedropper tool to select the skin color nearest to the blemish and use the paintbrush tool to cover your unwanted spot with one light dot. Make sure the hardness of your paintbrush is turned way down — you want the radius of the dot to be fuzzy, and not to look like a polka dot.
Right click on this layer and select “Blending options,” then experiment with the opacity. You want to be able to see the difference between the edited layer and the original (click the eye icon in the top right of the layer box to see what it looks like before and after), but you don’t want it to be obvious. A subtle change, similar to what you would normally accomplish with makeup, can make a much bigger improvement than a sloppier, more opaque coverup.
Repeat these steps to cover as many blemishes as you need to improve the overall look of the photo, but try not to cover all of them. You want the untrained eye to think this is your natural skin, and no one will believe your whole face is made of plastic.
Once you’ve covered blemishes, add a new adjustment layer and select “Selective color.” Experiment with the color scales under Neutrals, Yellows, Reds, or whatever you need to improve your skin tone. People with olive skin often look brighter and healthier with a bit of yellow increased, people with deep or dark skin often benefit from a bit of red or blue, and people with pale skin sometimes need a bit of green to balance the red in their coloring. Only add as much color as you need to add a bit of glow. If you overdo it, your whole photo will look overly edited.
2. Improve your whites
You’d be surprised by how much of a difference you can make by correcting the color of your teeth or the whites of your eyes. Photo editing apps like FaceTune make this easy with dedicated “whitening” tools, or you can play around with the white category under a “Selective color” layer on Photoshop. Add or subtract a bit of blue to make your teeth and eyes the brightest parts of your face. This sends a subtle message to the viewer that you’re in good health, thus improving your attractiveness.
3. Draw attention away from chapped lips, frizzy hair, or wrinkles
The “smoothing” tools on apps like FaceTune can be great for this, but people often get carried away and end up with photos that look impossibly smooth. If you’re going to use one of those, make sure you zoom in as far as you can and add light, gentle strokes of smoothing. You never want to run a smoothing tool liberally across your whole face or all of your hair. A better option is to open Photoshop and play around with blurs. Right click on your original image to create a duplicate, then rename that layer “Blur.” Select the filter “Gaussian blur” and drag the scale down so that the blur is very subtle.
Make your eraser tool large and remove the blur from any areas that you want to be crisp, leaving behind the parts you’d like to tone down. This works well for the edges of hair, making them blend into the background a bit and distract from frizz and fly-aways. It’s also a good way to lightly smooth chapped lips so they won’t be the first thing people see, making you look put-together.
If you plan to use this trick for smoothing wrinkles on your face, make sure you keep the blur light, so there isn’t a staunch difference between the area that’s blurred and the parts that aren’t. You want it to be hard to tell that you did anything.
4. Fix up your eyebrows
You may have gotten away with keeping your eyebrows as thin and sparse as possible in years or decades past, but eyebrows are having a big moment right now. Young people want theirs to be full, dark, thick, and symmetrical. If you’re not able to achieve that naturally or with the help of makeup, photo editing apps can help. Use the eyedropper tool to grab the color from a fuller part of your eyebrow and use the paintbrush tool to lightly fill in any gaps and improve the shape. Use this tool very sparingly. If you can tell you changed something, your changes are too stark.
The goal is for a person scrolling through Instagram to quickly assess your photo and think you look symmetrical and well-groomed, not to think you’ve been painting a whole new face. Think of these tools like virtual makeup. It’s best used for enhancing natural attractiveness, and it’s going to have a very hard time creating beauty where it didn’t exist before.
5. Use negative space to your advantage
These tips can vary a bit by gender identity. Very few women look their best when they’re up close and personal, and if you’re not Taylor Swift, you might benefit from some clever framing. Stand at a distance from your phone or camera (using a self-timer is a great way to accomplish this) and make sure you leave a background visible on either side of your face and above your head.
In your editing app, play with the cropping tool until your face is in the exact center of the photo, but some space remains around you to frame your face. This is the reason some influencers will put their photo on a background, either white or black or decorative. When your face looks smaller in comparison to the background, you’re subtly manipulating the viewer to see you as dainty. On the flip side, if you’re trying to look more powerful, intimidating, or masculine, cropping your photo closer around your face can help to send that message. Both of these tricks work equally for men and women, of course. It just depends on the feeling you want to convey to your viewer.
It may seem superficial to some, but a lot of life takes place online nowadays, and there’s nothing wrong with wanting to be attractive to your internet audience. The most important thing to remember, no matter what, is that these tools are best used to enhance the attractiveness nature gave you. You don’t want to look plastic or cartoonish. Use editing tricks to spruce things up here and there, but leave the harsh lines and body shaping tools behind. You’re already beautiful, and photo editing is a fun way to show that beauty to the world!
