I’m going to lose a significant portion of the image. Looks great! But if I want to post this to Instagram, I’ll be forced to crop it to a 5:4 ratio. Take a look at this image of model Samantha, shot in studio with my Nikon DSLR, in the standard 3:2 ratio: Photoshop CS5 added Content-Aware Fill, and earlier this year Photoshop CC brought us Content-Aware Crop. Photoshop Content-Aware tools have been around in some form or another since 2008, with the release of Photoshop CS4.
The new solution is Photoshop Content-Aware Cropping. This was fine, but not ideal, and made Instagram’s famous grid of square thumbnail images look a bit wonky with varying amounts of white space. The old solution to this was to use tools like Photoshop or very specific image-editing apps to shrink images without cropping them and then add white space around the image. For DSLR photographers who shoot in the standard 3:2 ratio, this posed a huge problem when posting vertical photos, since their image would still have to be cropped (just like it was back in the good ol’ square days) to fit into Instagram’s 5:4 space.
When Instagram introduced non-square images last year, they still limited their new rectangular formats to very specific aspect ratios - horizontal photos can only be as skinny as 16:9 and vertical photos can only be as tall as 5:4.
Instagram, since its inception, has limited photographers to posting square photos (a 1:1 ratio). The solution? Adobe Photoshop Content-Aware tools, including Content-Aware Cropping and Content-Aware Fill.įirst, some background. With this new flexibility also came some new challenges for DSLR photographers, namely how they can squish their 3:2 ratio images into the 5:4 ratio space that Instagram provides. Exactly one year ago this week, Instagram overhauled their app in a major way to allow non-square photos to be posted for the first time.