The Latest Photo Editing Tips and Trends for January

New year, new decade, and new photos! Are you still thinking long and hard about what’s going to be your first social media photo this year? Or whether or not you want your feed to have a theme this time? We’ll make the answer to these questions a lot easier by showing you some trending color palettes, filters, and photo editing styles to consider to put together a stunning new feed to start your year off. 

Color Schemes for Inspiration

Take a look at these three color palettes we’ve put together to inspire your social media feeds and photos for this month. 

New Year’s Sparkle

Bubbly champagne, sparklers, glitter confetti, and fireworks are the first things we think of for New Year’s celebrations. Taking inspiration from all of these, we end up with deep bronze and golden hues, anything that reminds us of sparkle. Combine these colors with basics such as white or black to get even more of an elegant combination. 

Neutrals

Tired of all the bold and bright colors? That’s completely okay! Luckily, neutral themes are trending just as much as the brighter ones. After all the celebrations for the holiday season, you deserve to go back to the basics and experiment with lighter tones like off-white, grey, and beige. While these colors may sound boring for some people, there is a lot you can do to get creative and make them unique. 

Color of the Year

If glitter or neutrals is not your thing and you’re more of a colorful person, then try out Pantone’s color of the year for 2020. Every year, a new color is considered to be the most trending one for the upcoming year, from anything like logos and branding to fashion. Classic Blue (HEX/HTML #0F4C81) is this year’s color. It’s very specific and you may not take photos with this exact shade but you can work with various shades of navy blue that are similar to this color. Pair it with earthy tones so your feed isn’t just full of blue.  

Travel Through Your Images

Not all of us had the chance to take our dream vacation over the holidays. Although, you have a chance to let your photo-self transport into different worlds. Editing yourself into the fictional worlds of some of your favorite cartoons is a creative and fun thing you can do in your spare time. We’ll show you just how quick it is to do on Pixomatic’s desktop editor. 

To recreate the through the window style, start off by choosing your background from any cartoon that you want to use. 

Then add your photo layer on top of it, making sure the photo fits on top of the background equally. Crop if necessary until both layers are the same size. 

Using the Refine tool, erase the parts of the top image to reveal the background underneath. Continue doing so until the background is seen through the entire window section. Adjust the brush strength to a lower setting for the edges to make the transition less abrupt.

And that’s all it takes to transport yourself to a fictional world!

Pixelated Style

This month, Pixomatic launched a new tool: the Mosaic brush. You can use this tool pixelate certain sections of the photo or even the whole image. These tiny squares, or pixels, aren’t only great for practical purposes, you can also get artsy with it. Pixelate the eyes of a portrait like we tried out above to get a mysterious and abstract tone to your regular portraits. 

If you’re looking for a more playful use out of this tool, then you’ll enjoy creating cartoon-like effects. Play around with the density setting to edit your image to look like it came straight out of a video game or cartoon world. 

Filters to Try Out

As the decade came to a close, the styles of the previous are still trending. Specifically, so many people are editing their photos inspired by the styles of late 90s to early 2000s photos. This includes adding grain, noise, and blur to images to imitate the less sharp images that cameras would take during this time.

On the Pixomatic mobile application, you can find dozens of filters to give your photos this style under the Polarize category. For the images above we used Polarize R08 and T01. Feel free to manually add more Grain and Blur if you’re feeling the need. Overall, try out this imperfectly perfect style for your photos to change things up. 

We hope these helped spark some inspiration for your upcoming photo edits. Come back for our February photo editing trends blog post next month.