Photos taken by digital camera look downgraded on instagram?

[Jose]

Ok so I have a sony hx10v 18mp and it takes pictures real nice, but as soon as I upload my photos from sd card to my computer I notice they don't look as crisp & sharp looking at it off the PC... Even from there uploading them directly to my computer to my ipad to upload them on instagram they don't look as good, what am I doing wrong? I've seen people taking more crisp images with 8mp phones. Thanks.

[Mark]

Some photo sharing sites will automatically compress the pictures that are uploaded to them. They have to do this because so many pictures are uploaded that they would seriously risk running out of space if they uploaded everything at its native size. I would imagine that Instagram does this a lot: firstly because I would guess that an enormous number of photos are uploaded to it every day, and secondly because it's not a photo site anyway, it's a networking site. Instagram is to photography what Dan Brown is to serious literature.

If you want your pictures to look decent online, you want something like Flickr, or (even better) your own site hosted on a site like Zenfolio or Smugmug. Putting your pictures on Instagram is basically the same as saying "please don't take me seriously".

You might also want to sharpen your shots a bit before uploading them: compressing them will affect their sharpness negatively, so you have to polish them a bit before uploading them.

[joedlh]

Check your camera's resolution setting. There are two issues in your question. The first is the appearance of the images coming off the camera onto your computer. If they look good on the camera's LCD and you have the camera set to low resolution jpegs, they're not going to look as good on the computer because the computer's monitor is much larger than the LCD. Read your manual to see how to check and set the resolution setting. You should always shoot at your camera's highest setting. That's because it's easy to scale down a hi res shot, but impossible to scale up a low res one.

The other issue is that some photo sharing sites compress the images. There's little that you can do about this except to make sure you upload good quality images.

[Chuck]

Instagram resizes images as you upload them to 640x640 (before mid-2013 it was 612x612). It does not use a very robust resizing algorithm, so image quality can suffer.

You'll see (much) better results using your own software or app to resize (and optionally sharpen) your image to 640x640 before handing it off to the instagram app, since that will avoid their own resizing.

You can empirically prove this to yourself via some experiments -- take a highly-detailed image and upload it multiple times -- including full resolution and resize it (yourself) to various smaller sizes. You'll find resizing to 640x640 (and applying appropriate sharpening) will be the best result.

Keep an eye on the instagram API and blog for updates. They already stepped up from 612x612 to 640x640 in mid/late 2013 -- they might step up again. You'll always get the best results resizing outside of instagram, but you obviously want to resize to the highest resolution instagram supports.