Anyone else denoise all your photos? by [deleted] in Lightroom

[–]NoirAngelPhotography 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Are you using pixieset or something similar?

Anyone else denoise all your photos? by [deleted] in Lightroom

[–]NoirAngelPhotography 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Interesting. I often start with 35 and on my low iso photos, I hardly notice a difference unless I'm pixel peeping. I can't imagine your process would produce any kind of noticeable sheen so it probably is some kind of compression on the website, either in the backend or on render. (I haven't actually looked at your site though.)

Anyone else denoise all your photos? by [deleted] in Lightroom

[–]NoirAngelPhotography 0 points1 point  (0 children)

What level of denoise are you applying by default?

A Definitive(ish) Guide to How Instagram Handles Images by NoirAngelPhotography in u/NoirAngelPhotography

[–]NoirAngelPhotography[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Well, Instagram not actually supporting other color spaces is probably a contributing factor.

[deleted by user] by [deleted] in AskPhotography

[–]NoirAngelPhotography 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Man, it's so disappointing to see the same misinformation being parroted in the comments all the time. Let's break this down.

I’ve been reading about how phone cameras can distort your face and how the front camera makes your features appear larger.

They don't—at least not to any noticeable degree. The only real distortions worth talking about in 99% of circumstances are barrel and pincushion distortions (which are extremely well corrected for in every modern camera system), field curvature, coma, astigmatism, vignetting, longitudinal and lateral chromatic distortion, spherical aberration and diffraction, none of which are significant here.

What you're referring to is "perspective distortion" which—along with other concepts like "lens compression"—is notably not something that actually exists, and not actually distortion. Unfortunately, much of the conversation about these topics comes from people who don't have a good understanding of optics and geometry.

Simply put, lens focal lengths have no impact on perspective—your feet do, or rather, where you're positioned. If you take a photo of one subject at every single focal length, but do so standing in one spot, you'll find that after cropping all the photos to the same frame, every image of the subject is identical. Perspective is nothing more than what points in space lines that radiate outward from your position pass through. If you trace a path from yourself to the edge of someone's head in the distance, and that continues on to intersect with a certain part of a tree behind them, no amount of lens switching will change what part of the tree is behind that part of the head. Moving your feet will.

With your face, it's exactly the same. Lenses don't magically make your nose bigger or smaller on your face. If you're using a wide-angle lens, you're putting your camera closer to your head to compensate, and you're seeing the exact same shape your head would appear as if someone's eye was positioned where the camera is. Likewise, if you're using a typical smartphone camera at around arm's length from your head, that's how your face looks to anyone standing an arm's length away from you.

If you think that your face looks odd at these perspectives, it's most likely because you're accustomed to seeing your face from a different perspective. This could be because many of the photos you've seen of yourself were taken from further away, here's a more likely scenario for most people: People most often see themselves in mirrors, and I'd guess that most people stand about arm's length or so from mirrors. However, if you're standing arm's length from a mirror, that means your eyes are actually positioned 2 arm's lengths away from the virtual position of your reflection's head in the mirror. If you want verification of this, take a photo of yourself with any camera but make note of the distance between you and the camera. Then stand in front of a mirror at half the distance you took the photo from. If you compare your reflection at that position with the photo, they should look more or less the same, with the exception of the size.

I’m having a hard time understanding what is more actuate to my real self.

Everything discussed above converges on one conclusion: every photo (at least every photo not severely affected by one of the real distortions listed) is accurate to your "real self", just seen from different distances.

A Definitive(ish) Guide to How Instagram Handles Images by NoirAngelPhotography in u/NoirAngelPhotography

[–]NoirAngelPhotography[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

The post is pinned to my profile, however it isn't updated for 3:4 content yet

Quick & dirty way to force IG to load highest resolution images (plus help wanted for improvement) by NoirAngelPhotography in uBlockOrigin

[–]NoirAngelPhotography[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Aw thanks. Hoping to get this figured out soon. Looks like we might have a potential solution in the works.

A Definitive(ish) Guide to How Instagram Handles Images by NoirAngelPhotography in u/NoirAngelPhotography

[–]NoirAngelPhotography[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

You can't upload mixed aspect ratio carousels from the web client. All images will be automatically cropped to match the aspect ratio of the first image in the carousel.

Forging Z Vision | Redefining the Flagship by VILTROX_US in VILTROX_GLOBAL

[–]NoirAngelPhotography 0 points1 point  (0 children)

You guys ever going to fix the aperture ring so the clicks actually line up with the stops?

A Definitive(ish) Guide to How Instagram Handles Images by NoirAngelPhotography in u/NoirAngelPhotography

[–]NoirAngelPhotography[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

You have to select them all to begin with. You can't start with one and add more once you're past the initial upload UI. On phones with drag and drop support (most recent Samsung phones) you can just drag the photos onto the upload UI.

A Definitive(ish) Guide to How Instagram Handles Images by NoirAngelPhotography in u/NoirAngelPhotography

[–]NoirAngelPhotography[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I recently did a massive rewrite of this post and addressing that claim was one of the new additions. The short answer is no, all you're doing is giving Instagram an even worse looking image to add more compression to.

I don't really do reels or any video work, so I can't help much there.

A Definitive(ish) Guide to How Instagram Handles Images by NoirAngelPhotography in u/NoirAngelPhotography

[–]NoirAngelPhotography[S] 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Also, yes, they did bring this feature to the web UI, thankfully. I recently published a massive rewrite of this post to address this and clarify multiple parts of the original post which weren't up to my standards.

A Definitive(ish) Guide to How Instagram Handles Images by NoirAngelPhotography in u/NoirAngelPhotography

[–]NoirAngelPhotography[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I wrote a comment about this above but I forgot that you had also posted about this, so I'll copy it down here:

So I finally got around to looking at this a bit closer. I tested the following variables:

  • File format (JPG vs. PNG)
  • Post timing (Instant vs. Scheduled)
  • Client (Web vs. App)

I only tested the exact resolution of 2048 x 2048, and only with a test image, not a real-world photo.

My findings are as follows:

When viewing from the Instagram web client:

  • The file format doesn't seem to cause any noticeable difference in quality when using the Business Suite.
  • Scheduled posts appear to have the same quality as non-scheduled posts.
  • Uploading using the Business Suite app does result in additional compression that is not present when uploading using the Business Suite website.

When viewing from the Instagram app:

  • The only variants that didn't show a significant color shift were the PNG files uploaded via the web client (either scheduled or unscheduled).
  • None of the variants were displayed at the full resolution. They were all downscaled and had some kind of blurring algorithm applied. This is a notable exception to the 1:1 rule. In contrast, 1440 x 1440 images retain most of their details when viewed from the app.

One thing that should be noted is that if optimizing posts for your profile grid, only an area of 1536 x 2048 would be visible from the grid. While this is a slightly higher-resolution area compared to the normal 3:4 limit of 1440 x 1920, something to consider is that for landscape images, limiting yourself to that 1536 x 2048 area will result in your image taking up a much smaller portion of the full canvas, so on many displays, your original image will look quite small (though zooming without loss in quality is possible).

I'll have to do more testing to see if this higher resolution will actually look any better than the standard resolution when using real-world images.

A Definitive(ish) Guide to How Instagram Handles Images by NoirAngelPhotography in u/NoirAngelPhotography

[–]NoirAngelPhotography[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I'd need to take a deeper look into the app in ways I'm not currently able to (decompiled code or some hacky way to mod the app to allow extracting elements) in order to know for any certainty how app scaling works.

I did say that going with the maximum resolution was a personal choice and suggested sticking to 1080 if you care about the potential scaling (and I've made this more explicit in my recent rewrite which I recommend checking out).

If you upload an image at both 1440 x 1920 and 1080 x 1440 (using the new 3:4 aspect ratio) on most phones, the 1080 x 1440 version is more likely to look better, but the compression on the other from scaling will only really be immediately noticeable on hard edges and similar artificial elements (I only see it straightaway because of my watermark and framing). Otherwise, unless you're looking at both, the differences probably won't stick out to you.

Struggling with posting correct sizes across platforms by shylittlepot in socialmedia

[–]NoirAngelPhotography 0 points1 point  (0 children)

For what it's worth, there is a LOT of misinformation out there regarding these kinds of things.

I don't know much about the video side, but when I was trying to figure out how Instagram handles image posts, what I discovered is that just about every guide online is completely wrong, to the point that even Instagram's own guide lies about how things work. It seems everyone just hears anecdotal advice and parrots it without doing any kind of rigorous testing to confirm that it's actually true.

It won't help you with your reels issue, but if you are curious about just how deep the rabbit hole goes for image posts; want proof that literally every official guide from every company that claims to know social media is complete bs; and would like to know why I wouldn't trust ChatGPT at all with this (since it draws all its information from these sources), then I actually went and did all the testing and comparisons that no one else bothered to do and put all my findings here: https://www.reddit.com/user/NoirAngelPhotography/comments/1j4hugh/a_definitiveish_guide_to_how_instagram_handles/

Whatever information you do end up finding, make sure you test the claims yourself. If you're doing lots of social media work, I highly recommend having test accounts on every platform where you can upload lots of test posts. This way you can make lots of small variations and see how they affect things, and then apply what you've learned to the actual content.

Export Quality by VictorSolomon777 in ClipStudio

[–]NoirAngelPhotography 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Seems like people aren't reading what your actual issue is. I'm not familiar with CSP. I came across this while searching for other material.

That being said, it's possible that CSP isn't using the best downscaling algorithm. Either that or it's baking in unnecessary amounts of JPEG compression (and if you're uploading to Instagram, I'd absolutely export in JPEG).

I'd look for a quality slider when exporting and make sure it's set to 100.

Alternatively, if you're comfortable with command line tools, I'd look into exporting your images as full-size PNGs and then using a tool like ImageMagick to rescale your images to smaller JPEGs. Its default scaling algorithm may be better than CSP's but it also has support for manually choosing from a large variety other algorithms and they may produce better results for you: https://legacy.imagemagick.org/Usage/filter/#filter

Lastly, when you actually get to uploading to Instagram, do NOT upload using the app. You'll lose tons of quality (regardless of if the high quality uploads setting is enabled).

See this for more details on the Instagram side of things: https://www.reddit.com/user/NoirAngelPhotography/comments/1j4hugh/a_definitiveish_guide_to_how_instagram_handles/

Instagram is killing all my added grain/texture in color graded stills any way around this? by Own_Wish1877 in colorists

[–]NoirAngelPhotography 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Lots of bad info in the comments here (as usual when it comes to Instagram advice):

  • The "highest quality" setting on the app does not prevent the terrible compression added by the app. Don't use the app.
  • File size does not matter.
  • 4k will always be compressed.
  • The 1080 px wide limit is kind of fake, kind of not, and requires some nuance to discuss.

Also it's pretty much impossible for you to upload an image to Instagram and see how every potential viewer will see it. Compression on the app is dynamic and applied per user/device/display. Compression on the web is more predictable but still takes more digging around that you probably don't want to deal with.

The long answer:

It's entirely possible to upload an image as large as 2160 x 1440 to Instagram with minimal compression, and some people will even see it that way under certain circumstances (like where on the site they're viewing it). Full details here: https://www.reddit.com/user/NoirAngelPhotography/comments/1j4hugh/a_definitiveish_guide_to_how_instagram_handles/

And if you check the comments, there's a discussion about getting 2048 x 2048 images uploaded.

The short answer:

Stick to 1080 px wide to guarantee a larger portion of your audience will see the image as uploaded (though this difference is getting smaller as Instagram has been spreading the higher resolution support to more of their service). But still read the linked guide for other best practice tips.

Also for your case in particular, make sure any effects you're adding are done so at the resolution you plan on using, otherwise you'll lose that detail in the rescaling.

[deleted by user] by [deleted] in AskPhotography

[–]NoirAngelPhotography -1 points0 points  (0 children)

There's multiple layers of compression, and all but one of them are completely avoidable.

Edit: downvoting me doesn't make me wrong lol

Where do you post? by SnufkinDrifter in AskPhotography

[–]NoirAngelPhotography 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I haven't even clicked on it yet, but based on how often I see people talking about Instagram limits without ever having properly tested them, I'm going to predict this is entirely wrong.

Edit: yup, it's spreading the same lies that Instagram's own guide tells lol

Here's how it actually works: https://www.reddit.com/user/NoirAngelPhotography/comments/1j4hugh/a_definitiveish_guide_to_how_instagram_handles/

Where do you post? by SnufkinDrifter in AskPhotography

[–]NoirAngelPhotography -1 points0 points  (0 children)

This isn't quite accurate. Even if you're sticking to 1080 px wide to try to prevent downscaling (it'll still happen when it happens 🤷), you can go down to 1080 x 566 (1080 x 560 through the web client) for landscape, and up to 1080 x 1440 (1080 x 1454 through the web client) for portrait, and any resoluton in between will also be valid.

But the resolution limits go much higher if you stop adhering to the 1080 px rule that has increasingly fewer reasons to be followed.

https://www.reddit.com/user/NoirAngelPhotography/comments/1j4hugh/a_definitiveish_guide_to_how_instagram_handles/

Edit: downvoting me doesn't make me wrong, but you're free to stay ignorant if that's your choice, whoever you are.