You work for hours working on an illustration making sure all the colors and proportions are just right for Instagram. Then you pick the right hashtags and tap that 'post' button. Only to find out Instagram has poorly compressed your beautiful artwork. Let us fix that and restore your artwork to all its glory.

Instagram, Twitter, and Whatsapp all use a similar image compression that does a poor job, especially with gradients and dark colors. The compression engine tries to find similar pixels and make them the same color.

The solution is to trick the compression engine by adding a little grain (or noise) to the image. Here is how to do it using my favorite photography app 'VSCO'

1. Download VSCO from the app store or play store.

2. Open the image in VSCO

3. Skip to the 'adjustment section' second icon.

4. Pick the 'Grain' option and set it to something comfortable.

5. Export the image and post it.

That's it now your work looks great when you post it, don't overdo the grain unless that is the look you are going for. VSCO also has beautiful filters and editing options you can further use to enhance your artwork.

You can also use photoshop or lightroom to add noise and get similar results. I hope this helped, would love to know if there are other things you want me to write about.