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Ever wondered how you can get your Instagram pictures to look like your favourite influencers'?

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A screenshot of Sarah Langa's Instagram page.
A screenshot of Sarah Langa's Instagram page.

The look of Instagram feeds of our favourite influencers are as desirable as the snippets of their lives they share with us. It’s the crisp pictures, the seemingly luxurious life and the creative flat lays.

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Increasingly, Instagram influencers have been playing around with uniform colours on their feeds – the recent trend is the variations of the orange and teal aesthetic. 

More and more Instagram bloggers and influencers are using this aesthetic that is also very common in the colour grading of movies. Many of us may see it as a filter but Instagram doesn’t design their built in filters quite like these presets.

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To put it simply, the basis of achieving this ‘filter’ depends on how you adjust the primary colours and the highlights and shadows. You'll have to do this yourself of course as the platform doesn't yet (cough) offer cheats.

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The key adjustments to be made to achieve this orange and teal look is to apply warm tones on the picture. 

That means using less blue, then increasing saturation, the blacks and the clarity of the image. However, the rest of magic lies with the tone curve when you adjust the shadows, midtones and highlights.

These are the principles to keep in mind if you are using a photo editing application like VSCO, Snapseed or even your own smartphone's built-in filters.

Instagram

Don't you just want to live in these warm autumnal snaps?

If you would like to use more advanced techniques you can achieve this in two primary ways.

You can either do it manually using picture editing software or you can download an already designed preset to add on your pictures as a sort of filter.

If you would like to achieve this look manually you can use any picture editing software that allows you to have access to the different primary colours.

Examples of this include software like Adobe Lightroom or Adobe Photoshop or similar products.

If you would rather apply edits that are already created you can download these from a variety of websites.

Some are free and others you'll have to use your credit card or other online payments depending on what's available.

If you download a present, or what is sometimes referred to as a LUT, you are able to adjust the intensity of the preset depending on the kind of picture you have.

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There are plenty of Instagramers and YouTube content creators that design and sell LUTs and links are often listed on their description bios or description box. If you would like to look elsewhere, you can browse through the following free LUTs for download and LUTs for purchase options:

Pineapplejuice.de

OnOne.com

Lutify.me

Bastihansen.com

Freepresets.com

There are plenty other websites that offer LUTs for download that you can use repeatedly on your Instagram photos to level up your Insta game.

The trick is to also take quality pictures. For example pictures with good lighting and sharp focus and a good smartphone with a great camera can easily achieve this. 

Have fun!

And remember to create unique content that people won't be able to find elsewhere. Otherwise your followers will get bored.

Get ready for lots of double taps.

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