Today I show you the best settings for your photos on Instagram in 2019
quite a few of you have been asking me about my export settings for Instagram,
so here they are, and be sure to watch to the end as I have a cheat sheet that you'll be
able to screen grab as Instagram does compress every single photo that you
upload you do need to exaggerate your settings to make them look as good as
they possibly can and don't be fooled by blogs or other videos telling you
otherwise they can press everything so they know that the compression rate is
the same across the board when you upload they make a set of images from
your uploaded image from 150 pixels right through to 1080 pixels so to
future-proof my images I upload at twice the resolution at 2160 pixels along the
long edge you can upload at any resolution and they will just resize
that image to a maximum of 1080 pixels the reason I upload twice the maximum
resolution is because if they ever changed the platform and they start
showing the images at a higher resolution if they keep the originals
that resolution will be there and there won't be any loss in quality well that's
my thinking anyway so this is the process I go through I edit all of my
images in Lightroom and then I export them and then transfer them to my phone
before uploading them to Instagram if you're not sure about editing your
photos in Lightroom but want to learn more click on the I in the corner or the
link in the description I have a couple of videos on this process once you've
got your photo to where you want it to be in your photo editor you want to set
your aspect ratio vertical or the portrait orientation photos work best on
Instagram and the ones that look really good
are 4 by 5 images once you've set it to 4 by 5 click export in this export panel
I set it to jpg I set the colour space - srgb
and I set the quality to 90% I choose this as it's a much smaller file and
it's really hard to see any difference between 90% and 100% now if space isn't
an issue on your hard drive or your phone you can use 100%
but I usually set it to 90 and I haven't seen any issues with this
I then resized the long edge to 2160 pixels and then I set my PPI to 72 I do
all my sharpening in Lightroom so I leave sharpening unchecked
Instagram wipes all the metadata so I don't worry too much about changing any
of those settings and then I export I have a Dropbox account so I send it
straight to Dropbox and then it's available on my phone through the
Dropbox app so if you have any cloud storage it's good to use that and if
they have a phone app you can then access these photos from your phone in
an instant if not share to your phone using airdrop on a Mac and an iPhone or
the equivalent on Android and PC once I have it on my phone I'll select the
image in the Instagram app and then scale it as it's bigger than 1080 pixels
I'll make subtle changes with the brightness the contrast and the
structure I'll then add a little sharpness then do all other stuff like
descriptions and tags and then I'll share it
one thing I've found is that if I do all my editing in Lightroom I'm not quite
hundred percent sure that I've got the settings right
sometimes I'll bring it onto my phone and I'll have too much sharpness other
times I'll bring it onto my phone and it'll look quite flat so what I've found
is I do my normal editing in Lightroom and then I'll bring it across to
Instagram and then I'll do the last little tweaks in the Instagram app this
means that you'll get the results that you want instead of trying to edit in
Lightroom and exporting it and uploading it to Instagram only to be let down that
the settings aren't quite right by doing it this way you do your basic editing in
Lightroom and then you've tweaked and tuned it in the app so you get to see
what it looks like before you upload it one other bonus as well is because
you've got that slightly higher resolution you can upload them to
Facebook and other social media outlets ones that have higher resolutions or
ones that will be viewed on PC screens or laptops and that's about it how are
you getting on with uploading to Instagram and social media do you have
any problems with it or do you have a seamless process if you do and it's
different to the way that I do it let me know in the comments it'll be
interesting to hear how you guys do it for more videos subscribe and make sure
you click the notification bell also head over to my youtube channel where I
have a growing library of photography and videography tutorials I'll see you
next time
you