Those photos you and your guests post to Instagram are about to get better-looking. Instagram introduced new creative tools last week that give users “the ability to adjust brightness, contrast, saturation, warmth and more.”
According to Instagram, “When you go to select a filter, you’ll now see a new wrench icon. Tap it and you’ll find a tray of photo editing tools ready for you to explore. You can also now adjust how much of a filter you apply to a photo by double tapping the filter icon.”
We did our own test of Instagram’s new tools below and results were clearly noticeable. For someone who is not a photographer, all of the new tools will take some practice, but Instagram includes a small icon next to each one that makes it easier to understand. The filters helped to enhance the colors of the tomatoes, corn, lettuce and cheese, and we were able to fade out the dark wood table to make the food pop.
Some 200 million active monthly users post 60 million photos to Instagram per day. Many of those photos are of food. While many operators have embraced the free buzz from consumers sharing photos of the food they eat at restaurants, some are concerned about a lack of quality control and disruption in the dining room as foodies pause to set up and snap their dishes. A few restaurants have even banned cellphones and/or picture-taking at the table.
For restaurants, taking your own photos and posting them to social media sites, such as Instagram, can be one more way to connect with consumers—especially millennials, says Datassential’s Maeve Webster.
Here are a handful of restaurant profiles that stand out on Instagram because of the quality, variety and authenticity of the photos they share. Judging by the number of followers each has, their techniques may be worth considering:
- City Grit: 788 posts, 11,421 followers
- Chipotle: 145 posts, 83,654 followers
- Ava Gene’s: 244 posts, 1,727 followers
- Pinkberry: 609 posts, 53,225 followers
- 50 Eggs: 1,308 posts, 4,331 followers
- ABC Kitchen: 123 posts, 10,274 followers
- Stumptown Coffee: 1,238 posts, 47,869 followers
Check out Restaurant Business’s Instagram account to see what the editors are eating and where.
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