Prepping photos - Facebook Tutorial

- Let's talk a little bit about selecting and preparing photos to post to social media. First step, you're going to have to decide what type of content you're going to share. And this could be a little bit tricky. I am going to offer some advice here, but ultimately you're going to have to decide what's right for you. In my case, I'm often torn. What do I share? It's a bit of a dilemma. I like to share things that are what I'm passionate about. So great photos that I'm proud of. Maybe things that I'm just taking on my phone or initial impressions. Maybe I'll share a finished edited photo and I'll post that content to get an idea of what people are thinking. But I also may share something more personal, letting pictures of my kids be shown or sharing what's on my mind. And I don't care about the popularity because I just want to let people see a little bit behind the scenes or what I'm truly passionate about. What you share is really a personal decision, but it may also be a group decision. So make sure if you work at a company you discuss it with your employer. And even if you're a personal, make sure you discuss it with your other boss, your spouse, or the person you're in a serious relationship with. It's important when you're going to be sharing information or sharing photos from your life, that the people who are in those photos have a bit of a say. Let's talk about some of the actual mechanics here of getting photos ready. I've opened up a few pictures here in Photoshop and I want to show you a simple command. It's called File, Export, Save for Web. And I like to Save for Web Legacy as it has a few more controls. Let's maximize this window. Here, you can really control things and adjust the resolution. When I choose to post to Facebook, I choose to not usually post my full quality file. Now, Facebook will do the resize for you, but do you want to put your high quality files on the Facebook server? You might not want to. You also may want to add a watermark or a copyright notice on the image itself. That's up to you. So if you're going to add the copyright, do that ahead of time, the watermark. You could do that with File, Place and this can allow you to add something like a logo or a signature. I'll place this here and I'll just navigate and find my logo. I can easily place this, invert it and just change its blending mode if I want to add my signature as a watermark. You can also drop in something like a PNG logo or a vector file and do the same thing. Command or Ctrl + T for free transform, makes it easy to adjust this and get it in the right place. Then bring back up that Save for Web command. File, Export, Save for Web. Here, you'll see some essential controls. Typically, you're going to go with a JPEG and JPEG High is going to give you a nice balance of file size and image quality. I suggest you take a look though here at the size itself. I'm going to take this down to 1200 pixels which is plenty for the Facebook timeline. Now it's going to give us a good quality size, but I'm not putting up the full quality image to Facebook. Additionally, I could see the download time. For example, this is a very fast connection about two seconds on a low quality streaming connection. So even someone on a cell phone will have this picture load almost instantaneously as they're scrolling through the timeline. And this is good. When you click Save, it's going to give you a couple of additional options. Make sure you take a look at what's happening here. You're going to save this image out and save it as a JPEG. That works quite well. When we do this, Save for Web it's also going to be adding the file extension and it will automatically convert it into the SRGB color space for the web. So, if we save that like such, it's now ready for upload and you see that was an easy process. Now you don't have to do this but if you've got very large high quality files, taking the time to resize is a pretty good idea. If you're in a hurry, Photoshop also offers simple batch processing. You could choose File, Scripts, Image Processor and now you can easily take an entire folder of images or all the open images and save those out to JPEG. You'll notice the option to resize and the ability to convert to SRGB. So if you want to take a bunch of images you've opened or even just target a whole folder, this image processor is a great way to batch process them and most other photo editing tools, including Lumina and Capture One and Lightroom all these tools like this give you the ability to quickly batch process several photos and save them out for Facebook or websites. The important thing here are two main steps. Consider reducing the resolution. By doing this, you're going to improve how fast you can upload the files, and you're not giving Facebook servers extra data it doesn't need or potentially compromising your intellectual property. And this one is essential. Make sure you get it into the SRGB color space, otherwise you'll see color shifts that are unexpected particularly with pro photo RGB. SRGB is essential to get consistent color on laptops, phones, and tablets. Otherwise, things just don't look quite right.