Picture this: You've just finished editing an amazing photo from a recent session with your dog and you go to post it on Instagram, only to find out that it looks much softer than it did when it was on your computer! Or it's somehow two shades darker then it looked on your monitor and you can't figure out why. Has this happened to you? If you said yes, I can promise you that you're not alone. There are a lot of different things that can affect the quality of your photo and video content when you post it on Instagram, which just adds another layer of hassle to the whole creative process.
Here are some of the most common questions/struggles I hear in talking to other photographers and content creators, and my tips for addressing each one!
My images always look so sharp in LightRoom, but the quality isn't as good on Instagram. How can I fix this?
I used to have this problem too and it took me a bit of trial and error to get the export settings that gave me the best quality when posting to Instagram. Usually, I export high resolution photos for myself and for brands I work with, but if you do this for posting to Instagram, your image gets compressed in the process, which sacrifices the quality and sharpness. That's why you need special export settings for social media.
These are the export settings I use for any 4x5 photo I am posting to Instagram (I post this ratio exclusively, but you may need to modify these settings if you post 1x1 or in landscape. I also use the Instagram editing tools to sharpen my photos before posting:
Image format: JPEG
Color Space: sRGB
Quality: 100
Check box for "Resize to Fit" and select "Width & Height" and then check box for "Don't Enlarge"
W: 2160
H: Leave blank
Resolution: 72 pixels per inch
Check box for "Sharpen For" and select "Screen" and "Standard" from the drop down boxes
The screenshot below shows you an image of that all the above settings look like in LightRoom desktop. Give this a try for your next photo and let me know how it goes!
My photo and video quality looks bad in reels....help!
I actually have come around to Instagram Reels, but my biggest pet peeve is how annoying the Reels editor app is. I almost never splice clips together using the IG platform because I get glitches and it sacrifices the quality of my photos and videos. I've come up with a couple of work-arounds that help me to preserve quality where I can!
Resizing photos: For any reel I do that includes photos, I always resize them to 9x16 before adding them in another app (like CapCut) or IG reels. To do this, I use the Unfold app. I use the last template in the Classico 01 pack and add each image one at a time, exporting the ones that I want to use for my reel. Then I upload them into an app like CapCut to organize them and time them to an audio. Just a heads up that Unfold is a paid app - there may be free features but I am not sure how many! It sounds tedious but I promise it's worth it!
Creating reels: I always make my reels in an outside app like CapCut or InShot. CapCut is free and works really well for most of my needs. I find that it minimizes any glitches with the reels editor and the quality of photos and videos looks better. I usually just extract the audios I want from a screen recording so I can get the timing right and then bring it into Reels, add my text, caption and cover, and post. You can also save your reel to your camera roll before posting in case anything goes wrong with your draft (this saves you time from having to add text all over again or text changing after you've saved it).
Upload quality: One last step you can take to make sure you are not sacrificing upload quality is to go into your IG account settings --> click Account --> click Data Usage and then toggle the switch for High quality uploads on. This will ensure your videos are being uploaded in a higher quality (see screenshot below).
I want to make one of those cool Instagram collage carousels, but I don't know how to use Photoshop.
Don't worry, there's an app for that! If you feel overwhelmed by Photoshop, but still want to make one of those fun collages where the photos overlap and break across frames, you can use an app called SCRL (scroll). Its 15$ for the year, so it is a paid app, but less than the cost of Photoshop for two months. There are a few free templates you can use as well, but you won't have many options for arranging your photos. Once you have the photos that you want, you simply choose a template from their library and click the plus signs to add your images. Then you export them and the app saves all of the frames to your camera roll. The last thing you need to do is open up Instagram and make a carousel style post and add your images. Below is an example of a recent collage I made using SCRL. When you actually post these on IG, there are no white borders between any of the photos.
I feel like my feed is a mess! How can I make it more consistent?
I'm a big believer that the way your feed looks on Instagram can help you get partnerships and brand deals - if you showcase a variety of images and types of photos, it's a bit easier for potential partners to get an idea of your account style and the work you can do. Now, if you're not interested in building your photography portfolio or engaging in brand partnerships, having a curated feed is probably not as important, as most people are likely just seeing the one photo you post each day.
There are a lot of different options when it comes to planning your feed. There's a host of apps like Unum, Later and Planoly if you have a lot of photos ready to go and want to see what your grid will look like over time. I never have a lot of edited photos ready to go, so I typically just look at what I posted the day before and go for a slightly different angle, pose or type of shot. For example, if I posted a close up portrait one day, the next I would maybe go for a photo of me and Willow that shows more of the background, and then maybe an action shot the day after that. It's worked well for keeping my feed diverse over time.
In terms of consistent editing, I think you really do have to edit each photo individually. Every lighting and color setting is likely going to be a bit different, and you can drive yourself crazy trying to edit everything a certain way. I usually keep things as consistent as possible by editing all of my photos with the same base preset (I primarily use @dcpresets Pack 4), and I tend to go for warm, bright and colorful edits. Within that general style, my individual photo edits will vary quite a lot. Sometimes its easier to pick a broad style (think dark and moody or bright and airy) and edit to a range within each of those, but don't let that "style" hold you back from editing each photo the way you want. I honestly think variety in types of photos makes a feed more eye catching and unique than having a very consistent editing style.
My images look great but they appear so much darker when I go to post them on Instagram. What gives?
I used to have this problem ALL THE TIME! It drove me nuts, and I ended up having to re-edit all of my photos in Lightroom mobile after sending them to my phone to post. They always looked way too dark on my phone screen even though they looked great on my desktop. Since getting a Mac, I haven't had this issue as much, but I finally figured out that it was due to my monitor calibration.
After looking into this issue, I learned that monitor calibration is kind of a big deal for photographers. If you think about it, it makes a lot of sense. If your monitor isn't calibrated, it can affect the colors, brightness and contrast of your images, and different monitors can result in your photo looking completely different even though it's technically the same image.
There are a few ways to calibrate your monitor, but most computers have a built in calibration tool (on a Mac it's System Preferences --> Display --> Color --> Calibration) which will walk you through each step of the process. You can find several articles online that will give you good starting points for how to set up your monitor to best view and edit photos.
If that all seems a bit complicated, try simply playing with the brightness of your monitor. I actually used to turn my desktop monitor brightness down to 50% when I had a PC, and that helped me better edit so that I wasn't having to make changes once I brought the photo into Instagram.
