How to change your background color on instagram story

One of Instagram's most requested features is the ability to change the background color for your Story posts.

While there is no official method for doing this in the app (via either a dedicated button or tool) Newsweek has found a workaround that should get you the desired results.

With the current Instagram functionality, you are unable to adjust the background of your Stories unless you are willing to jump through a few hoops. If you take a photo in the app and then shrink it down, you will notice that a color swatch is automatically generated for you, using the dominant hue from your image.

For instance, if you take a picture of the sky using Instagram and then tried to minimize it in the disappearing Stories section, you will get a blue background by default. There's no real way of changing this, as it's a fixed setting.

Social media experts have resorted to an inelegant solution in the past, whereby they would use the marker tool to create a solid block of color and then paste that over the Story photo. They would then get out the eraser to manually reveal the original image that is hidden beneath this additional layer.

In that sense, it wasn't really a background and had more in common with a mask that you would use in Photoshop. Plus, it often looked messy given that it's very difficult to get straight lines using the eraser tool in Instagram.

An example of a botched attempt at this can be seen below.

How to Change the Background Color in Instagram Stories

There is a better method that will get you a much nicer looking Story, while still granting you control over the color of your background.

The steps for doing this on a smartphone are as follows:

1. Take your desired photo outside of the Instagram app and then save it to your phone's album
2. Head into Instagram and create a new story, by taking a separate photo (this time inside the app). This one is just a placeholder, so it doesn't matter what it looks like
3. Tap on the three dots in the top right-hand corner of the screen and choose "Draw"
4. Select the marker icon from the bar on the top of the screen and then pick your background color from the row at the bottom
5. Press and hold your finger down anywhere on the Story. This will change the whole screen to the color you picked in step # 4
6. Then click on the sticker icon at the top of the screen and scroll through this list until you find the option for adding photos directly from your phone album
7. You can then add the original photo you took outside of the Instagram app (back in step 1) and lay it over the color swatch
8. Resize this photo to your liking.

For a more visual guide, Newsweek has depicted each of the steps in the below slideshow. Meanwhile, we have also prepared guides on how to do Joint Posts in the app and what happens if you screenshot somebody else's Story.

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