Instagram users post more than 95 million photos every day and spend 32 minutes looking at posts and stories. Users’ tastes change quickly and you need to grab their attention. To keep your Instagram photos from looking outdated, keep an eye on trends. We did a review of trends 2022 – include them in your content strategy so you don’t lose likes.
1. #Nofilters
Instagram users are tired of filters. Filters have long dominated Insta accounts and have lost popularity. Keep the line between editing and altering. Changing photos to an unrealistic degree makes users feel uncomfortable – their sunset photos will never be as vivid! And with every photo you refine on Instagram, polished posts lose their appeal. Users are more interested in natural photos. In them, people and objects have real texture.
Perfect photos have become so ubiquitous that “imperfections” will provide a refreshing contrast. Leave out the shiny skin or crumpled shirt – it becomes the highlight of the photo. You don’t have to give up editing altogether. To make photos look aesthetically pleasing, bloggers adjust the temperature, brightness, or contrast of the image. In some cases, they remove background from image to highlight the object. Finally, they apply filters but reduce their saturation levels. The A6 filter from the VSCO app is particularly popular.
2. Digital “film” photos
Digital “film” photography continues the trend of authenticity. Nostalgia is a strong emotion that brings back to the early ’90s when soapboxes were the limit of dreams.
Sometimes it seems that bloggers and brands scan Polaroid photos or upload film footage. In fact, they use special apps. They create movie effects from the ’90s for photos and videos – light highlights, vignettes, and blurs.
Like many of the other trends on this list, this one is retro in nature. But these photos are sharp, rich, and vivid. The flash can be relentless, but with the right subject, they produce crisp, bright images. This style of photography is cinematic but not polished. It feels authentic and real, like a photograph taken on a soapbox, but with style.
Multitasking apps like Afterlight 2 and VSCO have tools to give photos a retro-analog look. They all give your photos a dreamy, vintage effect.
3. Artistic filters: strokes, glitter, brushes
This trend is not about naturalness at all. The Instagram equivalent of designing a high school textbook covers strokes, stickers, and playful fonts. Creative publications grab the audience’s attention.
The popular Design Kit app can help get that effect. The app has stickers, backgrounds, and all sorts of brushes you can use to draw right on top of your photos.
This trend is fun and youthful. That’s why it’s good for brands with a bright, energetic aesthetic. If you realize that a no-filter atmosphere doesn’t suit your brand, try this trend.
4. Vertical photos
For a long time, square photos were the only publishing option. Even after the platform became allowed to publish photos of different sizes, square photos remain at the top. For a long time, vertical photos in the feed were considered amateurish, but that’s no longer a trend.
Before posting, make sure the square version of the image that appears in the profile grid is displayed correctly and important elements are visible. Even in a full-size photo, the center of the image should be convincing, not oddly cropped.
5. Carousel photo collages
Carousel images have been appearing on Instagram for a few years now. But it’s only recently that the use of this format has become popular.
Increasingly, bloggers and brands are using carousel-like collage format. They make it compelling to scroll through and see what’s not fully visible in the previous photo.
SCRL is an app for creating carousel layouts. It allows you to create a seamless panorama for Instagram, making it ideal for storytelling and viewing any visual narrative.
Use this idea to motivate your subscribers to go through all the photos in the carousel, similarly to how ecommerce sites make their customers view all the items in their product carousels They’ll be interested to see how one part of an image transitions into another.
And remember: The more time a subscriber spends looking at your Instagram posts, the better. This has a positive effect on your profile stats.
Ready to experiment with these editing trends on Instagram? Social media will constantly evolve, and your brand should evolve with it.
Also Read: How Instagram Is Changing Our World
