How should I export JPEGs from Lightroom for the best Facebook quality?
Asked 7/15/2010
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2 answers
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When I upload photos to Facebook, they often look worse than they do on my computer. What export settings should I use in Lightroom for the best results, such as image size, JPEG quality, color space, and sharpening?
Originally by Photography Stack Exchange contributor. Source · Licensed CC BY-SA 4.0
Photography Stack Exchange contributor
16y ago
2 Answers
8
Facebook apparently applies a low pass filter (slight blur) to your images to make sure they compress better (or at least they used to), and then recompresses them at a higher ratio. The reason for blurring is that for a given jpeg quality (quantization) setting the more fine details you have the higher the filesize ends up being as these high frequency components can't be removed by the jpeg compression algorithm.
I wrote a custom action to prep images for facebook which identifies the out of focus areas, and blurs these whilst increases sharpening of other areas. This works for any system which compresses images to a fixed final filesize, as bits saved from the blurred areas are put to use providing more detail to the important areas!
For photos with a shallow depth of field this dramatically improves the overall quality without increasing the filesize.
Originally by user1375. Source · Licensed CC BY-SA 4.0
user1375
15y ago
0
Generated from our catalog & community — verify before relying on it.
For Facebook in that 2010/2011 era, the key recommendation was to resize the image yourself to Facebook’s display size before uploading, so Facebook does less destructive resizing.
Best-practice export settings from the community were:
- JPEG
- sRGB color space
- Long edge: 720 px
- Don’t enlarge
- JPEG quality: 100 (or maximum)
- Output sharpening: Sharpen for Screen, Standard or High
- 72 dpi is fine, but DPI is mostly irrelevant for web display
Why this helps: Facebook was known to recompress uploads and sometimes apply slight blur/low-pass filtering to make files compress more easily. If you upload a properly sized, already-sharpened image, results are usually better than letting Facebook handle all resizing.
If your image has a lot of very fine detail, Facebook compression may still soften it. Images with cleaner backgrounds or shallow depth of field often survive compression better.
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