How to make a 3 in 1 Instagram post in Photoshop and upload it from your computer
No need for your phone anymore!
This week's video is all about how to make a 3 in 1 Instagram post in Photoshop and upload it directly from your computer.
In this video, I'm going to show you how to use photoshop, to create a three-panel, portrait image for Instagram.
This 3 in 1, portrait image technique, has become very popular within the filmmaking community lately.
It enables you to maximise your screen real estate on the Instagram feed and is a brilliant way to showcase behind the scene shots, before and after colour grades, and final frame grabs from finished projects.
Let's jump into photoshop and I'll show you how I do it.
This is by no means a new technique and it actually something that I used to use the Instagram layout app to do. Now though, as you can access the creator studio and upload to Instagram directly from your computer, it makes your workflow a lot easier, without having to use your phone.
Ok, so first up, you will need to open up photoshop and create a new document. Set the width to 1080 and the height to 1350. This is the maximum portrait size for Instagram at the moment. I create it exactly this size saves Instagram the trouble of having to heavily compress my images and you end up better and sharper results.
The next step is to set up your guides. Select view and find "new guide layout". Make sure columns and margins are unselected as we just need Rows. I personally prefer the 3 pannel layout, however, you can use as many as needed. So now that we have our guides set up it's time to bring in the images we want to use. You can either just drag and drop them in or use the script to import files into a stack. Once you have your images imported, you can arrange them how you like.
Now we're going to use masks to hide the sections of the images we don't need. I do it this way as it's a non-destructive workflow and it will allow you to recover the full images and rearrange them again if needed. You can do this simply by deleting the layer mask.
Once you have masked out what you need and have the image set up how you like, it's time to export. As this image is for the web, I use the save for web legacy function, this can be found under File > Export > Save for web (Legacy).
In the export dialogue box, make sure Jpeg maximum or 100% quality is selected. As I mentioned earlier, this is the exact size needed for Instagram and so there will be minimum compression needed.
Make sure convert to sRGB is selected. Under image size at the bottom, I use bicubic sharper as I'm resizing much larger images to a fairly small file. I found using this it helps to retain a nice sharp image at this size. All you have to do from here is select save and decide where you want it to go.
To upload to Instagram directly from your computer, log into Facebook and find the Creator Studio. From here, select the Instagram tab and find the profile you want to upload to. Select create a new post on the left-hand side. You can add all the details you normally would be able to including hashtags, location and the description. Make sure you go into the edit photo section and select portrait. Now when you're ready all you need to do is select publish.