I’ve seen that professional photographers use white borders around their photos on Instagram, why do they make their photos smaller by doing that? To preserve image quality?
If that is so why don’t they just use standard 1:1 , 3:4 or landscape mode which ig supports instead of custom crops
It’s to get the 1:1 aspect ratio, and it’s supposed to make your profile look nicer on light mode with everything laid out
I prefer a colored mat that matches the focus of the image.
I’m always surprised how many people are unaware that Instagram has allowed custom aspect ratios for many years now.
They do but within very narrow margins and they’ll crop and compress anyways usually. And forget about mixed aspect ratios in a single post.
care to explain?
It’s pretty useless if you want to post more than one photo. The AR of the first photo will be applied to all the other pics so if your photos are all different ARs it will not work.
It kind of draws your focus to the art and reduces how much the surroundings affect it. I like it for prints, but not so much for online; not that it’s wrong
It can look nice. It sets the photo apart from everything else around it, just like putting a photo in a nice picture frame.
Also, it sometimes alleviates the problem of posting multiple images of different sizes. Instagram likes to make all images conform to the ration of the first image chosen. If you put a border around images, you can adjust the size of the photo with the border to keep images consistent.
The white border give that feel of a classic hand printed photograph. The printing easel would mask the paper around the edge of the sheet of paper and leave the border. Very early in photography you would also see black borders on prints when they were contact prints from a negative held flat on the paper with glass, and the clear border of the exposed part of the negative would produce a black border.
In the printing industry and publishing/press fields the images would often have a rule line around them, a thin black line to especially stop a bright image bleed into the white paper and help the image stand out. A white border will help an image stand out from a dark background.
Any border helps to isolate an image from it’s environment like a frame on a wall. It give the image it’s own space and helps people to focus and concentrate on the subject. It contains someones attention. In a context like Instagram it hopes to stop you scrolling away and spend a few seconds appreciating the work. It certainly got your attention.
I do this on posts where I am doing portrait and landscape aspect ratios. Instagram will let you use custom aspect ratios but you can only use 1 aspect ratio throughout your post. And it’s got the added benefit of looking nice and making your profile look a bit neater
I love white framing IRL. But on online formats, not so much.
To my taste, it’s only pleasant on instagram if it’s consistent and well planed. And even, if a user is in darkmode (I am), it will look strange/ugly.
I prefer to work on the pictures I share to make a crop for instagram.
Personnal taste !
I think it’s because it gives you an idea of what they will look like printed maybe?
Aesthetic only…
I use borders only to preserve original 3:2 aspect ratio. At the beginning I was cropping my images for IG and all the time I felt that it’s wrong and I’m forced to do it. I shoot in 3:2, I initially see my frame in 3:2, if I will change aspect ratio I will get a frame that totally differ from my initial idea. What to do if I got perfect frame in 3:2 and there is just no room to crop? Skip posting? :D
Looks good in some cases?
back in the olden days pictures were printed on paper. They had white borders.
Because default image is 2:3 and insta is 4:5
I do it because Instagram won’t let you have a vertical and horizontal image in the same post without cropping.