20 September 2017

Tip on uploading good quality DSLR photos on Instagram

Edited on September 24th as I forgot to include a few things. 

This post has been long in the making since I had to re-write it a few times and kept postponing it because of this. Anyways, on to the subject.

I've been experimenting a bit with uploading my photos to Instagram and at first, I thought I had it all figured out, but as I did some more testing I got confused. I was almost finished with writing a mini tutorial about this topic, but I did, even more, testing and finally figured out what worked for me.

The reason behind all my testing is that I have been experiencing some bad decrease of the quality of the photos I upload to Instagram. This is with my DSLR camera and not my phone camera. It has been like this for some time now, but I never bothered to look for a solution before now.

Here are some examples of the compression Instagram has done to my photos. The original photo is on the left and the one from Instagram is on the right.



It's pretty bad as you can see.

My initial thought was that one of the reasons was had to because I have been resizing my photos to 700px on the longest side as this is the size I use for my blog. But during my testing, I learned that the pixel resolution had nothing to do with it.

I urge you to do your own testing with uploading as my research suggests different things work for different people.

What has worked for me, is to use the Save for Web in Photoshop 7 instead of the Save As which I normally use. In Photoshop CC you find Save for Web under File > Export. I don't know how this works with other editing software.



This tip will not be useful for everyone. Maybe most people already use the Save for Web and therefore never experienced this compression, but I do know a few people have had the same problem and I hope this can help you.

Next week I'm going to a cottage on a small island here in Denmark with my sister, brother, and sister-in-law. I will take one of my SDs and my two Pureneemos with me. Hopefully, I will get some nice photos.

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