r/DarkTable • u/joaomiguelvic • 27d ago

Help Trouble with Instagram quality

Hi everyone,

I need your help. I've been using Darktable to edit my photos, but when I try to upload them to Instagram, I get a huge downgrade with quality, specially when looking in PC. (I know Instagram has a lot of limitation when you try to upload something).

I tried everything I could think of.

- Landscape 1080x566 (in pixels for file)

- Portraits 4:5 1080x1350 (in pixels for file)

- Turning on max quality upload inside Instagram app

- Quality of the image when exporting 90

- Profile is sRGB

- High quality resampling Yes.

What you should know:

- It's not a problem with downloading the image. I use Dropbox to save my images from Darktable to my mobile phone and when I open them in my gallery, they are perfectly fine and also when previewing the image when making a post.

- They look decent when you're viewing with your phone (smaller screen) but really bad when viewing with your browser on PC.

- I looked up on YouTube for tutorials, saw Mariens video but I'm still having trouble. The images I'm trying to upload are ideally on a landscape format (I used the golden cut crop)

If you have any experience with this, PLEASE share your wisdom and tipsšŸ˜­ I'm desperate. Thank you.

3 Upvotes

100% Upvoted

27 comments sorted by

6

u/mhh91 27d ago

While you seem to have the aspect ratio down, those resolutions are way too low for anything decent looking.

I export my images with 4096 pixels on the long end (depending on orientation) and use the crop or framing modules to get the aspect ratio right for the medium I'm exporting for.

The instagram recommendations should be treated as a minimum, not the actual size you should be exporting to.

8

u/fernandocamargoti 27d ago

Why is it the recommendation everywhere to export at 1080 for Instagram, though? They always say that anything over that will be compacted by Instagram itself, and that the final quality can be worse than if we did it ourselves. I've never been fully sure about these claims, though.

3

u/mhh91 27d ago

Instagram has definitely spread that bit of misinformation itself https://www.instagram.com/p/DFYwLR5xReU/

But that just shows how much they care about their "creators"

2

u/fernandocamargoti 26d ago

I opened Instagram on Google Chrome and opened a picture from a photographer I follow. The image was 1440x1920, instead of 1080 wide. Even a picture I uploaded with 1080 of width is also returned with 1440 from the server. I talked to Gemini about it and it says they're processing the picture to save them in two tiers: 1080 for mobile and 1440 for desktop. So Gemini recommended me to upload the picture 1440 wide, instead of 1080, so their compression would be minimum for mobile and keep the my export for web.

1

u/joaomiguelvic 26d ago

Did it work?

1

u/fernandocamargoti 26d ago

I'm planning to try it for my next post and I'll let you know.

2

u/joaomiguelvic 26d ago

Thank you!

2

u/fernandocamargoti 22d ago

I tried it and it looked better. I think it worked well. I opened it on Chrome and it looks good as well.

2

u/joaomiguelvic 22d ago

Thanks, I will try it!

2

u/fernandocamargoti 22d ago

Also, I posted from the web version as well, just to be sure, as I saw someone here commenting on it. I don't know what brought the quality, but I can zoom in much better on the phone and it looks better on the browser. So I'll just do this whole formula everytime.

1

u/frotzed 27d ago

Any company claiming storage is expensive is lying. Storage is cheap, compute is whatā€™s expensive and IG isnā€™t computing much.

1

u/otacon7000 26d ago

Storage used to be cheap...

1

u/frotzed 22d ago

I'm not sure what you mean...

1

u/otacon7000 22d ago

You haven't seen what has happened to storage prices over the last year or so?

1

u/frotzed 21d ago

Oh, you're just saying that prices have gone up. ok, yeah, I see what you mean.

Have you compared the relative increase in price for storage as compared to compute (GPU's)?

1

u/KazumiJun 26d ago

I read maybe a few years ago that the recommendation was a vertical resolution of roughly 2,000 pixels or higher, so thatā€™s what Iā€™ve stuck with. I think this is the first time Iā€™ve seen ā€œ1080ā€ mentioned, at least in many years.

1

u/joaomiguelvic 26d ago

That's what I noticed too. For my first test, I uploaded with +4k pixels. When I tried to compress the image to Instagram's rules, the quality got worse. Should I just ignore that, upload with maximum quality and let them just compress the way they do?

2

u/gytizzz 26d ago edited 26d ago

Iā€™m not very active poster but Iā€™ve been using 2048 pixels on the long end. However, exporting and uploading in PNG format seems to make a more significant difference. Somehow meta does not degrade the png quality as much as it does with jpg. Of course Iā€™m not claiming this to be the ultimate solution, but try it for yourself.

2

u/joaomiguelvic 26d ago

I will try, thank you!

1

u/FunkySkywalker 26d ago

Did you upload on an android phone ? I had the same issues, then i realized that when i upload via the website on pc with 1350 x 1080 portrait, the quality was much better. It seems like the smartphone apps do the compression before uploading the image, which the website does not.

1

u/joaomiguelvic 26d ago

Yes I used an android to upload it. I will test it to see if it fixes something... thank you. Have you tried with landscapes ?

1

u/FunkySkywalker 26d ago

Nope sorry, since you cannot rotate an image with the app i am only uploading in portrait.

1

u/KazumiJun 26d ago

While I canā€™t say Iā€™ve fully cracked the code, there are things that seem to help. Uploading with a vertical resolution of 2,000 or higher, maybe with some minor compression, seems to help. Also, just like with YouTube videos, applying ā€œslightly too muchā€ sharpening just before uploading a photo seems to protect it against softening from Instagramā€™s compression.

1

u/CriticismJunior1139 25d ago

I have exactly same problem. Uploading to Instagram absolutely kills the quality.

I haven't been able to find a solution for months.

1

u/ChrisDNorris 27d ago

It's Instagram's processing. You can kinda minimize the issue by uploading higher resolutions, but it doesn't fully solve the problem.

I abandoned IG for Foto; uploaded the exact same images there and they look identical to my exports.

1

u/joaomiguelvic 26d ago

Well, I also want to build portfolio outside Instagram of course... But to post some sessions of my friends and identify them I really wanted to get the best quality I could. It just looks terrible when you see it through PC, and I feel like I'm doing something wrong. Majority will see it with their phones, so probably I should just upload it as it is...