Exporting Underwater Photos: Print, Social Media, and Portfolio

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A few months ago, on a dive boat off the Catalan coast, I showed a student his freshly edited photos in Lightroom Mobile. The colours were gorgeous, the framing perfect, the blue cast correction impeccable. He posted them on Instagram that evening. The next morning, he sent me a puzzled message: the colours had shifted, the image looked soft, and the deep blue he had carefully recovered in editing had vanished.

Exporting an underwater photo without losing quality requires knowing three things: the right resolution for the destination, the correct colour profile, and the appropriate compression format. Each destination (social media, print, web portfolio) has its own requirements, and ignoring them means sabotaging hours of editing work.

The truth is that nobody teaches export. We talk about composition, light, editing. But the final link in the chain, the step that turns a Lightroom file into an image seen by the world, remains the forgotten child of the photography workflow.

Social media has become the natural showcase for underwater photographers. Each platform imposes its own constraints on format, resolution, and compression. Understanding these constraints saves the frustration of "it looked great on my screen but terrible online."

Instagram

The Instagram feed favours the 4:5 portrait format (1080x1350 pixels), which takes up more space in the feed than landscape. For Stories and Reels, the 9:16 format (1080x1920 pixels) is standard.

The critical point is the colour profile. Instagram displays in sRGB. If you export in Adobe RGB (which some software defaults to for photographers), your colours will appear dull and desaturated on screen. For underwater photos, where recovering reds and oranges is the entire point of editing, this mistake is particularly visible.

Export as JPEG, quality 85 to 95%, sRGB, with output sharpening for screen. Instagram recompresses anyway, but starting from a quality file limits degradation.

Facebook

Facebook recommends 1200x630 pixels for shared posts and 1080x1080 pixels for the feed. The platform applies aggressive compression, much more than Instagram. The solution is to export at maximum quality (95-100%) to leave headroom for Facebook's compression.

A detail many people miss: Facebook reduces image quality more for uploads from mobile than from desktop. If the quality of your underwater photos matters to you, post from a computer when possible.

YouTube thumbnails

For thumbnails of your dive videos, minimum resolution is 1280x720 pixels, but 1920x1080 is recommended. The 16:9 format is mandatory. A well-contrasted underwater photo with a readable subject even at small size makes the difference in click-through rate.

Print is the ultimate test of an underwater photo. On screen, pixels forgive a lot. On paper, every flaw shows.

Resolution and DPI

The basic rule is straightforward: 300 DPI for professional print, 240 DPI minimum for acceptable results. DPI (dots per inch) determines print fineness.

To calculate the maximum print size of your file, divide the pixel resolution by 300. A 12-megapixel sensor (4000x3000 pixels) produces quality prints up to about A4. A 48-megapixel sensor handles A2 without issue.

For underwater photos taken on smartphones, the native resolution is generally sufficient for prints up to 30x40 cm. Beyond that, upscaling tools like Topaz Photo AI can help, but with limitations on fine details (scales, coral textures).

Colour profiles

This is where underwater photographers make mistakes most often. Two profiles exist for different purposes.

sRGB is the standard for screens. It is the default profile for 99% of web browsers, social media apps, and smartphone screens. It is also the profile most consumer photo labs use.

Adobe RGB offers a wider gamut (more representable colours), particularly in greens and cyans. For underwater photography, this difference matters because our images are dominated by these tones. But Adobe RGB only shows its advantage on a calibrated screen or at a professional lab that handles this profile.

When in doubt, stay with sRGB. An Adobe RGB file displayed on an sRGB screen (meaning nearly all screens) will look dull and desaturated. The reverse is not true.

File format

For fine art printing (framed prints, exhibitions), 16-bit TIFF without compression remains the reference. The file is heavy (often 100 MB or more), but it preserves all tonal information.

For standard photo labs (prints, books, canvas), maximum quality JPEG (100%) is sufficient in most cases. The difference from TIFF is invisible on a standard print.

Never send a PNG to a print lab. The format is designed for web (transparency, lossless compression), not for print.

An online portfolio is the underwater photographer's calling card. The challenge is twofold: showing images at their best while keeping load times reasonable.

The ideal resolution sits around 2048 pixels on the long side. This is enough to fill a Full HD screen with quality headroom, without being excessive for a 4K display. Exporting larger only makes it easier to steal your images.

JPEG at 80-85% quality offers the best weight-to-quality ratio. At this compression level, the difference from 100% JPEG is invisible on screen, but the file weighs two to three times less.

Before export, fill in your IPTC metadata in Lightroom: author name, copyright, description, keywords, shooting location. This metadata is the only truly effective legal protection against image theft. It survives download and sharing (unless someone deliberately strips it).

The watermark question divides photographers. My position is pragmatic: for portfolios, a discreet watermark (name or logo, in a corner, semi-transparent) deters opportunistic theft without ruining the image. But it does not replace metadata, and it does not protect against determined theft.

In training, I see the same mistakes come back constantly. Some are easy to fix once you know them.

Resizing after sharpening is the most common error. Output sharpening must be applied AFTER resizing, not before. If you sharpen on a full-resolution file then reduce for Instagram, the sharpening will either be invisible or create artefacts. Lightroom handles this automatically if you use output sharpening in the export panel.

Exporting in Adobe RGB for the web produces dull photos on 99% of screens. This was the mistake my student made on the boat. He had edited in Adobe RGB (because "professional photographers work in Adobe RGB") and exported without converting to sRGB. All his underwater colour recovery was lost.

Double compression happens when you export as JPEG from Lightroom, then the platform recompresses. Each JPEG compression cycle loses some quality. The solution: export at maximum quality (95-100%) and let the platform do its own compression.

Forgetting metadata is not a technical mistake, it is a strategic one. Without IPTC metadata, your underwater photo circulates online without your name, without your copyright, without any way to contact you. In a few clicks in Lightroom, you can create a metadata template that applies automatically to every export.

To simplify everything above, here is the workflow I use and teach in AquaExposure training.

For each edited photo, I create three exports.

The social media version (Instagram/Facebook): 1080px long side, sRGB, JPEG 90%, screen sharpening, metadata included. This is the version I publish the same day or the next.

The portfolio version: 2048px long side, sRGB, JPEG 85%, screen sharpening, metadata included, optional watermark. This is the version that goes on my website.

The archive/print version: native resolution, Adobe RGB (if the lab supports it) or sRGB, JPEG 100% or 16-bit TIFF, full metadata. This is the version I keep for future prints.

In Lightroom, these three exports can be configured as "export presets." Once created, a right-click on the photo launches all three exports simultaneously. The time savings are considerable when you process 50 or 100 photos after a week of diving.

Exporting is not the glamorous part of underwater photography. It is technical, repetitive work, often rushed out of impatience. But it is also the moment when your photo goes from "file on a hard drive" to "image seen by the world." A bad export can ruin an hour of editing. A good export, configured once and applied consistently, preserves every nuance you patiently recovered underwater.

If you already edit your underwater photos in Lightroom, take ten minutes to configure your exports. If you edit on your phone, the same principle applies in Snapseed and Lightroom Mobile. And if you want to speed up your workflow with presets adapted to each water type, you will save time at both editing and export.

Underwater photography deserves better than a default export.

AquaExposure receives no affiliate commission on the software or services mentioned in this article. Recommendations are based on teaching experience and personal use.