These are some of the best tips that you can get for Getting the most optimal settings for Instagram getting your pictures sharp the quality without you know Degrading the quality of your image and all of that so I want to show you guys the best settings some of Instagram secrets if you will that will help you optimize the image and really get that cool it effect on Instagram That just makes your pictures pop out a little bit more So this is an image that I shot of model date And I want to walk you guys through how I would normally edit this and export it for Instagram So let's go ahead and open up the image.
I'm using Photoshop Alright, so the first thing I'd like to mention is that I shot this image in Camera Raw It's very important to shoot in Camera Raw if you're new to photography Definitely get into Camera Raw don't shoot JPEGs because when you shoot JPEGs, you're basically letting the camera translate the colors and in turn interpret the colors rather and Export and compress a JPEG image for you but when you shoot Camera Raw You're taking the creative control so you can really control all of the color information all the details the exposure Etc and you can control that in post-production? So that's what I've done here Usually when I have the Camera Raw app on Adobe on Adobe Photoshop opened Really? What I just do is just do really slight touches So in this case, what am I do is just bring down the shadows a little bit You know increase the whites ever so slightly. I always like to crush the blacks. I like my blacks black and the whites white You know, I don't really go too crazy with the clarity because if you do that kind of looks like HDR And I don't personally like that look Always increase the sharpness you always increase the sharpness. You can never get your image sharper or sharp enough So once that's done, you know again I don't do too many crazy things here because I do everything in the actual Photoshop app I'm just gonna go ahead and open this Okay.
So now that I have the image opened One thing to keep in mind is that when you're looking on Instagram, right? you you have Instagram opening your phone the Background layer for Instagram is always white and that has a different effect when you're looking at the images It makes the colors translate differently to your naked eye. So here on Photoshop the background is some kind of dark gray and Obviously the colors are translating differently to me. So what I like to do is I like to change the background color to white Especially so since I'm ready editing for Instagram, so I already have this preset in here So now I have a white canvas as my background. So now I can really get into all of the nitty gritty into details So first I like to do always is to duplicate the background layer because you don't want to be working on your original layer And then, you know, I like to zoom in just to take a look to see what I would like to retouch here and there So luckily for me This model has really beautiful skin. So there's not a lot of work to be done maybe with the exception of some minor blemishes here and there some little pimples here and there we can just take that off using the Spot Healing Brush normally when I do skin retouching especially if the model skin is looking kind of harsh or if there are a lot of Uneven texture and details and all of that. Our skin is already looking good to me So what I'm just gonna do is just very minor spot healing fixes here and there Take that off. Let me zoom in closer. So you guys can see what I'm doing Take that off. So on and so forth There and when I reach skin I Don't like to go overboard I like to keep it really simple really Natural because I still want the part of the subject to look like a human being and not like a doll.
So I like to You know, just keep it very minimal. Keep it natural. I don't go too crazy like some other photographers might do Stuff like the smile line I like to keep the smile line because that's natural in most people once you take this smile line off, then she starts looking like a doll and that looks kind of artificial to me So, yeah, so I'll just go ahead and just take get rid of these tiny little spots where I see them and You know, that's what I would do for this image as far as skin retouching goes now the next thing that I like to do after doing some minor skin retouching is that I like to Enhance the image, right? Because I myself I'm a model and I know how important it is for models to have nice Chiseled features that are well lit and all of that so, you know day here she already has nice cheekbones but what I want to do is I want to Pronounced those cheekbones a little bit more by using a little bit of Dodge and burn tricks that I know In Photoshop.
So what I'm going to do is I'm going to create a new layer and What I'm going to do is use a brush in This case I'm gonna use a white brush and I'm just going to brush over Wherever I see a highlights in her cheekbones and her you know jaw and all that kind of stuff I'm just gonna brush over those areas that I want to Pronounce and then one thing you should do is to change your blend mode to soft lights and Then we can just kind of brush over These areas ever so slightly Reduce my brush size Okay, and now I'm going to create another layer Okay, so let's see what that looks like on and off So as you can already see What I did just now is already changing the shape of her face and make it her cheekbones more pronounced so now what I'm going to do is I'm gonna create a new layer and I'm gonna do the opposite of what I just did So this time I'm going to use a dark brush. And in this case, you just hit X to toggle on the colors there and I'm going to use a dark brush. Oh Don't forget to change your blend mode to soft lights And I'm just gonna use a dark brush to just brush underneath those highlighted areas Now don't worry if this looks Too extreme.
I'm gonna show you how to resolve that in a second There's too much So now So now when you're doing this you want to think about this like applying makeup like you're almost kind of contouring the face so now what I'm going to do is I'm going to just basically Decrease the opacity by a lot right, so Let's keep it at I think of twenty six looks pretty good to me now Let's keep it at twenty six twenty seven, okay So now let's zoom out a little bit and let's see I'm gonna put these two layers in a group. So to do that on the Mac You can just select both layers and just hit command G and that puts them in a group and let's call this group enhance So if we were to turn this on and off you can see how What I just did just basically in a way almost kind of lifted her face right it almost kind of lifted her cheekbones made her face looks more structured more chiseled and Without the enhanced layer her face looks a little bit more rounder than normal alright So that's how I would do some enhancements Another thing that I like to do is I actually like to sharpen the subjects eyes Because that's very important because I feel like when you look at portraits One of the first things that you notice in a portrait is the subjects eyes So for me, I like to keep those really sharp.
So what I'll do is I'll just take use a sharpening tool here And just brush over her eyes just a little bit And I would also do the same for the eyebrows All right, so now if we were to turn that on and off You can see it makes a big difference so Another thing that I like to do is I like to whiten the eyes just a little bit so for dads, I like to use the Dodge tool and Just brush over some of the red areas just ever so slightly All right So now let's toggle that on and off So you guys can see how much more striking her eyes is after those little enhancements Okay. So now that I've done that it's always good to check back to see how far you've gone in the progress because you know You want to make sure that you improving the image not taking away? So I like to just go back to the original just to look at that for a second and then toggle that on and off Okay Okay.
So another step that it likes to do is I like to do some color in some color correction and Photoshop actually has a lot of really cool tools on the new adjustment layer that you could use like the color lookup the color mixer Photo filter all these are really good so for instance I'm just going to show you some of these ones and and show you how what I like to use So first is the photo filter you just hit okay there So now this already adds a warm filter and you can actually scroll down to select other types of filters that you could add to Change the look and feel of the image right? It's almost like applying Instagram filters if you will, but that's not what I'm trying to do here. So I'm just going to Step back and hit the undo and the next thing I want to show you guys is D Colorlookup So we call a lookup these are basically the less than a presets with Photoshop.
I personally don't like Them very much. I find that they don't necessarily work for most of my images But you know, you guys can play with them and see how you feel about it and if it's something that you would like to use something that fits what you're doing But yeah, I personally don't use these at all So anyway, let me just delete this layer so what I like to use I like to use the new adjustment layer and I like to come down to selective color Just hit OK on this screen.
So now with the selective color you can actually go down Through all these colors in the images and make fine adjustments So for the red the opposite of right if you want to add more red you have to take away two cyan so the opposite of red is science, so I'm just gonna scroll this down just A little bit and it makes really fine adjustments to the image And maybe he just curse the blacks a little bit more So that way her skin looks like she has more blood and red her so she doesn't look as pale Okay, and then you can come down to the other colors and play with that if you like and see what that does for you and If you like those effects All right, so now I'm at a place where I feel comfortable with this color that I've created Let's toggle this on and off just to see the difference again It's very subtle, but you can see her skin tone looks a little bit warmer and more lifelike So in this without the color enhance, she looks a little pale She looks a little bit yellow, which is not her natural skin tone But once I added the color enhance She looks more warm more more earthy because that's the kind of the look I'm going for in this image. so what I would do is that you can just hit the C on your keyboard and what this does is that it brings up the crop tool and Under the crop tool actually this is set to ratio by default So under the crop tool, you can come down to ratio and just manually type 4x5 because the ratio for Instagram is actually 4 by 5 max and the max width is 1080 pixels by 1350 pixels so Photoshop actually has a preset for this already for a squared Instagram photo For 4 by 5 Instagram photo which is actually 8 by 10 So you can just hit that to understand.
What's your your maximum height and width for Instagram and just crop the image accordingly? So in this case, I'm going to basically crop the image Oops did that too soon. Let's try it again Okay, so I think this frame I'm just gonna bring this up a little bit and That frame looks pretty good to me. So I'm just gonna okay, that's and move on to the next step Alright, so the last step that I like to do before I export this image for one more round of sharpening So this round of sharpening is really going to help your your photos pop out a little bit more on people's Instagram feeds It's gonna make it look very high-quality. Like there's no compression in your image at all So for that, what I like to do is just if you're on a Mac just hit the command option shift and E and Basically what that does is that it creates a new layer with all of the effects.
You've already added under layers below compiled into one layer so on this new layer, what I like to do is that I like to convert this into a Smart Objects and Then after converting to a smart object, what you want to do is you want to add a filter and do a high-pass filter so usually that's I believe in the other and Just go to a high-pass Now let's zoom in here a little bit Now the goal of this high-pass filter is to bring it up to a number where you could just see the outline of the image Right, but you don't want to go too crazy because if you go too crazy the photo is extremely sharp, and that looks like HDR photography which I'm not really into So I think to me about a one point six Looks good so I'm just gonna hit OK and Then you want to change your blend mode again change this to overlay So now the image is overlaid so you can see this looks really sharp right now And if I was to toggle this on and off you can see it makes a little bit of a difference So let me go closer. So you guys can hopefully see so this is off and that's on off and On now keep in mind when you put this on a cell phone.
It's gonna look a lot different and even more vibrant more sharper More high-quality like there's almost no compression at all So my very last step hmm, my very last step is to export this Using the best and optimal settings for Instagram So that way there's almost no compression of your images and it looks really good once people look at it on their feet So the last step I'd like to do is I like to go to file export As So now you want to export this as a JPEG, of course Sometimes some people like to reduce the quality of the image just to save file size But I don't like to do that at all I always like to keep the quality of the image at a hundred percent and instead just reduced the max width and height of the image So remember I said the max ratio is four by five or ten eighty by 1350 so I'm just gonna change this to 1080 and That because this is constraint proportions it automatically adjusts the heights for you Another thing to keep in mind is that you want to make sure that this color space that you're converting to Srgb, because if you don't Instagram is going to compress your photo and convert it to srgb for you But if you already do that on Photoshop, then Instagram is not gonna do that and your image is gonna maintain its quality So once you've done that you can just export this image Alright guys, so that's it for this article.
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