Instagram export settings from Lightroom?

[tobyp83593628]

Hope someone can help me with a solution to this?

I'm having difficulty getting images from my camera (Ricoh GR) too look anything near decent when i upload them to Instagram however look great viewed in iPhoto on my Mac. I have tried using both Raw and Jpeg formats but neither make a difference when putting onto Instagram.

I have read the previous forum on this where it suggested using 1080 x 1080 and experimenting the quality between 75 to 100 but still they look blurred and poor quality.

Does anyone have any other settings that will definitely work? I have version 5.7 of Lightroom and i am exporting them to an iPhone5s to upload on to Instagram.

Any help greatly appreciated, thanks!

[Jao vdL]

LR/Instagram - Lightroom Publish Plugin for Instagram

[tobyp83593628]

Thanks for that, however I've just tried doing it through this way and still it looks really blurry. I think its more to do with getting the export settings correct but i just can't figure it

[Jao vdL]

Can you link an example? I get good results with just the default settings on that plugin and also when I post from LR/mobile to instagram on my phone. Instagram is just extremely limited in its resolution and appearance (by design I guess) and stuff will likely never look really good on there.

[tobyp83593628]

Sure, above is the photo i have on my Mac which has reduced down to the size your able to upload on here. And below is the one from off instagram, too me they just look really low quality compared to so many other photos people upload with the same camera on instagram

[ManiacJoe]

What are the pixel dimensions of the original picture?

What are the pixel dimensions of your cropped picture, if you cropped it?

What are all your export settings?

[tobyp83593628]

Dimensions of the original image are 4928 x 3264

When i exported from lightroom i tried what another forum suggested which was to put width and height values both at 1080 and I'm unsure which quality i had it on. Ive seen a lot of people suggesting different settings for File size limit, width and height and resolution in pixels per inch but none of them have worked at all for me and still turning out the same.

Maybe there isn't a way to get them looking any better but if i search for ricoh gr images on instagram and look at some other users they look a lot clearer to me

[dj_paige · Accepted solution]

I believe the problem is Instagram and not Lightroom.

It has its own algorithms for resizing photos, and in my opinion, this is where the blurriness comes from. There may be ways to eliminate or reduce the resizing done inside of instagram, but I am not really aware of what can be done to eliminate the Instagram resizing issues.

[tobyp83593628]

Yeah i believe its to do with instagram itself and over compressing images which makes the quality look bad. You can edit resolution values of the photo when i export for lightroom and I've seen other people saying values which work for them to give a clear image on instagram, but i just can't find the right solution

[Jao vdL]

That's about par for the course. Instagram images have to fit within a 1080x1080 square, so your non-square image will have a maximum resolution of 1080x715 pixels. It will also recompress your image and this often results in suboptimal results. The point of instagram really is not maximum quality but using the quirks of the medium (low quality, square images, etc.) to your benefit. This often means overprocessing a bit to get more popping colors and perceived sharpness (mostly clarity and high contrast). The plugin I pointed too will scale for you to the optimal size and should give you the max of what you can get with the medium but you need to process to make the image pop at lower res.

[ssprengel]

Instagram allows non-square photos, now, and I have a friend who routinely posts portrait shots usually are 1080x1349 although I have seen the height up to 1080x1363, but her landscape photos are 1080 on the longest side.  I think this is the pixel resolution of her phone so it's possible a higher-res phone would post even larger size.

[Jao vdL]

That's correct. Instagram downscales any picture wider than 1080 pixels to

1080 pixels according to this: https://help.instagram.com/1631821640426723

, so even a newer phone won't get you more pixels on landscape images. It's

inherent to instagram. The reason is that images are always displayed in

vertical mode on a mobile device (instagram doesn't flip when you flip your

phone) and so what matters most is the width the image, notsomuch the

height. This means landscape ratio images always end up low resolution. I

erroneously wrote that it has to fit in 1080x1080. Really the only thing

that matters is the width. Bottom line to get better quality is to post

square or portrait photos. Not landscape ones.

[mendiolacristian]

Try creating the most lightweight image export settings and still good quality you can on lightroom, the lighter the image you upload to Instagram, the less compression it will to try over you image, that's all.

[govindvkumar]

Here, the issue is, When you upload a big image file to Instagram then the Instagram algorithm downsizes the Image quality. So, it is always better to upload the image in a resolution which is supported by the Instagram platform.

For Best performance an Image with an Aspect Ratio of 4:5 in Portrait orientation with the longest edge being 1080 pixels and an Output Sharpening set as "High" works.

If you are using Lightroom then you can use these Lightroom Export settings for Instagram for better outputs.