Instagram is a very popular phone app that works either with android phones or iphones.  Using your mobile phone to take pictures, the photos can then be shared on social media and on the public website of your Instagram account.    It is very popular because, the Instagram photo app offers professional photo effects that enhance your everyday life photos into great memories.

Instagram also offers apps that allow you to download your photos or send them to online print shops which allow you to send the photos you have captured on your phone to be printed in hardcopy.  The instagram  images are usually in a standard mini instagram format of  2″ x 2″ square.  They are unique and popular products.  They have become so popular that they are often included in a variety of project life layouts as tiny photos that add additional , creative oomph, to memory keeping and digital scrapbooking.

All this is great, but the unique size of the Instagram photos poses a challenge for people who want the effect but don’t have the time and energy to invest in a photo editing program or additional software or phone apps they don’t use often.

Steps to Creating Mini Instagrams

Using Picmonkey, a free photo online editor, I have created this tutorial so that you can create your own Instagram like photos.  In a later tutorial, I will show you how to create a photostrip with 3 2 x2 photos.  The following steps will take you through the process of creating the 2” x 2” Instagram photo with vintage like effects.  Picmonkey provides a variety of vintage photo effects that you can apply to your photos.  In this tutorial, I am aiming for a 1970s throwback Polaroid look to my photos.

Caveat:  I have not been authorized by either Instagram or Picmonkey to provide this tutorial.  This is a tutorial that I developed using the Picmonkey’s free online editor and similar characteristics of Instagram photos.

Step 1 – Select Your Photo or Image

The first step is to upload a single photo from your computer, you might have stored this photo on your laptop’s  hard drive or a separate jump or thumb drive.  I usually work from my computer desktop, as it makes working with the photographs a lot faster and easier.

Using the Picmonkey “Edit a Photo”,  option upload the photo you want to work on.  (Tip:  I would suggest that you experiment with a free image from Microsoft’s free image databank or an image that you don’t mind experimenting with until you get the process right.)  Part of the trial and error process comes from the original quality of the photograph itself, for example, is it overexposed? Is there too much red, green or blue?

Step 2 – Cropping Your Photo Into A Square

Under the “Basic Edits” menu, select the “ Crop” function.  Under the drop down menu select the “square” function.  This step will make the cropping overlay grid into a perfect square. Expand the square, to the fullest extent possible and select the area best suited to the image you want to create and apply the crop.  In this photo, you will notice that the dimensions are quite large, but we will worry about the size later.  At this point, you want to get the best  square crop of your image, since most photos are in a rectangular format. [Read more…]