It may sound a little bit strange, but you can definitely create videos and animations via Adobe Photoshop, at least if the editing doesn’t require too complex work. If you’d like to get those videos on your Instagram account, you might be interested in knowing how exactly you can export that video from your computer (or iPad) onto your Instagram with all the correct settings.
Using Adobe Photoshop CC to create Instagram videos
Who says that you can only use specialized video editing software to create small videos and animations? It turns out that using plain old Adobe Photoshop will do the trick just fine for simpler projects, and the learning curve is also a lot lower, especially if you’re already familiar with Photoshop. We won’t get into the details of you can actually make videos or animations in Photoshop, as there are plenty of YouTube tutorials (such as the one below) that will cover those topics completely in depth.
What we will explain to you in this article, however, is how to export your Photoshop videos to Instagram easily. Do keep in mind that rendering your video may take up a little bit of time, especially if you’re not using a powerful computer or device. Nonetheless, Photoshop is an absolutely versatile tool and can definitely come in handy if you want to create video content for your Instagram account. Posts, stories, or reels, you can pretty much create videos for anything you want.
Prerequisites
- A sufficient amount of disk space on your device
- A finished video editing file in Photoshop
- And just a little bit of patience to render it 😉
You won’t need a ton of free disk space, but everyone who has ever worked with Photoshop (or Adobe products) knows that this software tends to take up a lot of disk space when rendering. Even though this is temporary, you’ll need need to have some free gigabytes laying around on your hard drive or SSD.
How to export video from Photoshop for Instagram
The process is fairly simple, although it may take a little bit of time depending on the size of your video project.
Step 1: Enable the Render Video Window and Timeline Window
It would be pretty useful to be actually able to get to the rendering settings, right? Go to File > Export > Render Video in the top left corner of your screen. You’ll also want to enable the timeline window for editing purposes. Head over to Window > Timeline at the top screen menu.
Step 2: Use the correct video export settings in the Render Video window
If you’ve done the previous steps correctly, you should see a Render Video window popping up giving you a bunch of settings. We’ve actually described the best video export settings for Instagram in a separate article, so be sure to check that out for optimal video quality and filesize.
The default settings are also fine, but may not be ideal for a platform such as Instagram. Aside from using compression, Instagram also is much more vertically-focused than regular video content. Make sure that the format is set to H.264. If you’ve got a beefy pc or if you have some time to render, using the “high quality” preset definitely can’t hurt.
Unfortunately, Photoshop doesn’t seem to support any presets for Instagram just yet, so just stick to your own export settings or the ones we’ve described in our separate article above.
Step 3: Select Adobe Media Encoder
After you’ve filled in a name for your video and also adjusted the export settings, don’t forget to select Adobe Media Encoder.
This is necessary to create a video, otherwise, your ‘video’ will just be a string of separate .jpeg images instead, and Instagram can’t read that as a video.
Step 4: Clarify the ‘range’ of your video
You might be wondering, what is the range of a video? Well, videos are basically just a bunch of still images placed after one another, and that’s exactly how Photoshop approaches it. It’s slightly different than using a ‘real’ video-editing software, but it does the trick well.
The range specifies the start frame and the end frame of your project, which will then be converted into a video you can put on Instagram.
Summary
Using Photoshop to export videos or animations to Instagram is definitely possible, and with the settings and how-to tutorial above, you’ll be getting them online in no time. You just have to make sure to enable Adobe Media Encoder, that your range is specified correctly and that your video editing timeline is set up properly.
