Instagram is a great place for people to share their content with friends, family, and for the most part complete strangers. So, what are the best export settings for Instagram from Lightroom?
When I upload to Instagram, I use certain settings to ensure I both future proof my images, but also to try and get the best out of the images I upload. I started using these settings after seeing a video by Mike Smith on the subject a little while back. They have worked amazingly ever since.
When you upload an image to Instagram, the website creates a number of images sizes from 150 pixes, right up through to 1080pixels. This is to ensure compatibility and best viewing across a whole host of different devices. What Instagram also does, is it resizes and compresses any image that you upload. Ultimately it does this to save space, but also so that images uploaded to Instagram, look uniform. This is especially important due to Instagram’s ‘scrolling’ view.
What are my settings?
Before I upload my images to Instagram, The first thing I do is to edit the photograph in my style using Adobe Lightroom. This is a paid-for piece of software that I have used for a little while and I find works incredibly well. So my settings will be for a Lightroom Workflow.
After editing, the first thing I do is crop the photo to a new aspect of 4×5. This is not far from albeit a little larger than the native resolution of what Instagram displays. Once I have found the best position for the image in that aspect, I then go to the export panel. This can be done by selecting the crop tool in Lightroom and changing the aspect.
From here I export the image by right clicking it and selecting export. Elementary stuff I know, but here is the important part. When in the export panel, scroll down to file settings. Select the image format as JPEG. I set my quality to 100% but you can set this to anything above 90% without any noticeable drop in image quality. You then want to set the color space as sRBG. There will be a future post all about color spaces coming soon.
For the image sizing, I have selected 2160 pixels on the long edge. Why? Well, as a future proofing method. Currently, Instagram only supports images that are 1080 pixels on the long edge. If this format was to change, the image size would be recreated from the original stored on the Instagram servers. if this does happen, the images will not suffer any drop in quality. Thanks for sharing your knowledge on that Mike.
As for output sharpening, uncheck it. All of the happening and edits have been done in lightroom before export. I don’t think it needs any more. On that, if you do want to add more then this can be done within Instagram on the upload page.
All you need to do then is upload the image to your mobile device and send it on over to Instagram. That is it. Done and dusted.
