❓Did Instagram change their color temperature and exposure handling lately? Any previously edited photo uploaded to Instagram looks totally blasted out after posting. Photos that look ok in drafts get big color shifts and exposure changes after.

It’s been this way for a couple weeks. It’s annoying that a photo app can’t do WYSIWYG editing reliably.

Is it just me? Makes me never want to post to Instagram again.

@mathowie Well if Shafer Trail doesn't really look like this I'm taking it off my bucket list.

@glass it wasn't purple when I uploaded! I picked a slightly wacky filter, but yeah, nothing close to this

Here’s a video of Instagram running on my iPhone. See how each time I pick an unedited photo, half a second later it “flashes” to some sort of auto-optimized one?

I don’t want this “feature”. I can see Instagram is trying to improve drab photos for folks but I know how to edit my own work and would prefer not to have my shit blown out exposure-wise. And I can’t turn it off?

Instagram is trash for photos now.

@mathowie stupid question because I don’t use instagram much but hasn’t that always been it’s thing? I remember seeing articles every time they’d release a new filter.

@JMBragg filtering is done by choice in the editing steps, and I always skip that. It’s never manipulated photos as you pick them before the editing step.

@JMBragg @mathowie but this is “automatic” - you can’t even seem to recover the original photo within the app

@mathowie this has happened to me too. It looks like shit and ruins my uploads

@joeblubaugh is it recent? Feels like it started a month ago with me.

@mathowie so my theory was actually a bug in how it handles the HDR metadata, as opposed to actually doing automatic touchup. In any case it looks horrible.

People have reported it going away, at least temporarily, after app reinstall

Yay software

@secretasianman it’s wild a company making a photo app would release versions that tweak photos into garbage and you can’t turn it off

@mathowie i used to get this with photos i'd edit in darkroom that i shot on my mirrorless as 10bit hfs and imported onto my phone. the editing workflow would first try to expand the photo into the display p3 color space (the brightly saturated flash) and then when it would get saved, you'd have these errors that would cause them to look exactly like the photo you uploaded when they were re-shared via icloud or whatever as heifs because there were slight incompatibilities between how i assume some color data was re-mapped when re-saving (darkroom fixed this eventually). some old ones still show up messed up when resized down, but if you view them full size they show up ok.

@mathowie the sun always shines on TV^h^h Instagram

@mathowie They added HDR support some time in the past few months, I wonder if that’s what it is.

@dan @mathowie Yeah, it’s HDR. If you load photos from an old camera or screenshots, that aren’t HDR you’ll see it doesn’t pop in brightness. Apple’s thumbnails in the photos app are SDR, but when you tap on them they get brighter, but it hides that in the zooming effect. Especially noticeable with bright skies.

@joesteel @dan I can see that but when I post to Mastodon it must retain original SDR formatting? I guess Mastodon apps ignore HDR color profiles?

@mathowie I just discovered that the Pixel 8 does that for seemingly all photos. Luckily you can turn it off but if they're going to inflict that on everyone at least make it not so bad.

@mathowie Instagram has been trash for photos for a few years. If you want a photo-centric app by and for photographers, I'm a big fan of @glass

@techphotoguy yes! I should use Glass more, I know people there and trust them.