Instagram vs. Lightroom
Over the last year or so, I’ve been shooting more and more with my iPhone. I feel that I’m not being true to the art of photography when I do this, but then I tell myself that it’s not about the camera, it’s about the photographer. So today when I saw some roses and decided to take a few shots (a drive-by, quick shots and run) after editing and posting them with Instagram and posting them to Facebook, I decided to take the same images and see what I could “get out of them” in Lightroom. The results, and comparisons are pretty surprising, after this I will certainly take the iPhone camera more seriously. The limiting factor in quality seems to be the iPhone editing app, not so much the quality of the camera itself.
Below is a side-by-side comparison of the Original iPhone JPEG image, the edited Lightroom image and the edited Instagram image. I’m impressed with the quality of the iPhone camera in the original images. I like the quality, flexibility and control, that I get with Lightroom’s editing, and I like the framing and the deeper saturation of colors with Instagram. I do not like that I cannot get a RAW image out of the iPhone camera, that would give me much more flexibility, and image quality upon editing in Lightroom, and I don’t like the loss of image quality from the Instgram filters.
Peach Rose – Original -> Lightroom -> Instagram
Yellow Rose – Original -> Lightroom -> Instagram
Peach Rose 2 – Original -> Lightroom -> Instagram
Pink Rose – Original -> Lightroom -> Instagram
Jonathon L. Jenkins (JLJFoto) 
Johnathon, so good to see you posting again. Beautiful roses… I could almost smell their fragrance. Personally, while I think they are both good, I do like the sharpness and clarity of the images edit in Lightroom better.
Thank you so much Emily! You crossed my mind this weekend, and I will give you a call today to catch up. I hope things are going well.