415 Creating the perfect Facebook cover photo 2015

- Hey gang this is Deke McClelland welcome to Deke's Techniques. Now this week I am really excited. I'm gonna show you how to create the perfect cover photo for the latest and greatest Facebook but here's the thing, I've even gone so far as to create a template file for you that's gonna help you align the cover photo with the profile picture because after all as you can see right here, the cover photo is integrated in to the profile picture and they align perfectly. Here, let me show you exactly how it works.

All right, here's that full size Facebook image template I was talking about. And it's gonna allow us to create the perfect cover photo that integrates seamlessly with the picture profile. And notice that I've gone ahead and created a grid pattern that I've set against this placeholder image. And the whole purpose of the grid is to demonstrate how the cover photo serves as a background for that profile picture and you can see of course everything aligns beautifully inside Photoshop but if we switch over to Facebook you can see that it exactly integrates here as well.

Assuming, of course, that nothing has changed in Facebook by the time you're watching this movie. All right, I'm gonna switch back over to Photoshop here, and I'm gonna zoom out by pressing control 0, or command 0 on a Mac. Now the first thing you want to do is find an image that you want to use as a cover photo. And I came up with this one that I shot at the Flatirons near my house and it comes to us from Deke's Techniques Number 356, Developing the Perfect Sunset. Now, whether you're working with this image or a different one, what I want you to do is press control a, or command a on the Mac in order to select the entire image.

And then press control c, or command c on the Mac to copy it. Now switch back to the template, assuming that you have access to it, and notice this little Cover Layer right there, it contains both the Layer Mask and a Smart Object as indicated by this little page. Go ahead and open the Smart Object by double clicking on it, and that will bring up our placeholder image from the Fotolia Image Library, about which you can learn more and get special deals at fotolia.com/deke Now, go ahead and press control v, or command v on the Mac in order to paste that image in to place.

Now you can see it comes in untitled, so I'll go ahead and rename it sunset, and I'm also gonna get rid of the placeholder image by clicking on it here inside the Layers Panel, and then pressing the backspace key, or the delete key on the Mac. Now, of course the image is way too big. We don't want to scale it inside the Smart Object. We want to do that inside the Layered Composition. Where this image is concerned, we just want to reveal it by going up to the Image menu, and choosing Reveal All, and that way we can see the entire image like so. Now go ahead and close the image by clicking on the close box up in the Title Tab, and I'll click Yes in order to save the image here on the PC, that would be the Save button on the Mac, and then you will see that image set behind that grid pattern.

I'm assuming you really don't want that pattern so just go ahead and turn it off. Once again, inside the Layers Panel. Zoom out a little bit, now notice that we've got a Smart Object, which means that we can scale it as much as we want without harming a thing, and it is not linked to the Layer Mask. That's very important. Now to scale the image to make it smaller, go up to the Edit menu, and choose the Free Transform command. And you can see this thing's just gargantuan. So I'll go ahead and zoom out a little bit and now I'm gonna drag one of the corner handles while pressing the shift key.

And notice as I do, I'm scaling the image so that we're not really seeing much of it inside the Layer Mask anymore. Now if that happens to you, just go ahead and drag the image in to place. Now, we do not want what we're seeing right now. We do not want some exposed edge either on the left hand side or the right hand side. So if anything, you want your image to be too big like so. It should also reach all the way up to this blue bar and all the way down to below Your Name Will Go Here. In other words, the Transformation Boundary should be larger than the portion of the image that we're seeing through the Layer Mask.

All right, I'm gonna go ahead and drag this guy over a little bit. I think I want the image set to 100%, so I'll just go ahead and turn on the Link icon between the W and H Values up here in the Options bar and then I'll click on the W and set it to 100 like so, and then I'll press the enter key, or the return key on the Mac to accept that change and I'm liking this pretty much. I want to drag the image up a little bit so that the top of the tree is almost touching that blue bar, and then I'll press the enter key, or the return key on the Mac to accept that change. And notice, just like that you manage to integrate the cover photo in to the transparent background of the picture profile.

And in case you want to find out how I created this specific profile you can check out my course, it's called Designing Your Own Online Avatar. And it walks you through the entire process. All right, now what we need to do is turn this background image in to a cover photo. First thing you want to do is alt click, or option + click on the eye in front of this cover layer, and then you want to press the shift key and click on the Layer Mask to turn it off like so. Now we need to select the image, and the easiest way to do that inside of this template is to switch to the Channels Panel, which by default is right next door to the Layers Panel, then drop down to this last Alpha Channel which is called Full Cover, and press the control key or the command key on the Mac, and click on its' thumbnail, and that will load the selection.

Now we want to copy the visible stuff inside the Selection Outline, and you do that by going up to the Edit menu and choosing Copy Merged. All right, now press control n, or command n on the Mac to bring up the new dialog box. By default, the preset should be set to Clipboard, in which case, you'll see everything you need in order to accommodate this big image. And notice it's way too big, and that's because I had to scale the template so it's large enough to accommodate the picture profile. But that's okay. Everything's gonna work out beautifully. All you need to do is click OK and then press control v or command v on the Mac in order to paste in that image.

Now switch to the Layers Panel, and press control e, or command e on the Mac to merge the image in to its' background. The next step is to scale the image by going up to the Image menu and choosing the Image Size command. Make sure that the Resample check box is turned on, and that the Width and Height values are linked together. Then, go ahead and change either Width or Height to Pixels, and what we want to do is dial in that value. The Width value that I told you about in a previous movie. Which is 2048, so two thousand and forty eight pixels that automatically changes the Height to 758 Pixels which is precisely what we want.

Now you can change the Interpolation setting to really whatever you like. A lot of folks go with Automatic, which is the same as Bicubic Sharper. Especially when down sampling because that goes ahead and give you these prickly little edges. I happen to hate that. I think it's generally a bad idea, which is why in this case, I'm gonna go with Bicubic Smooth Gradients which is gonna give you the best results in most cases. And then go ahead and OK in order to accept that change and notice that we end up with a much smaller image. All right, now let's save it, not by choosing the Save command, but rather by going to the File menu, and choosing Save for Web.

And next, go ahead and change the File Format to either JPEG if you want to apply a modicum of compression, or to PNG-24 if you want to apply no compression whatsoever. And if you have a good connection, PNG-24 is generally the best way to go because after all, you have to consider that Facebook is going to resave your image as a compressed JPEG file. And one JPEG compression on top of another is usually a bad idea. But I have a pretty sluggish connection here, so I'm gonna select JPEG, and I'm gonna go with Very High as my Quality setting.

Make sure that Convert to SRGB is turned on right there and otherwise, you don't have to do anything but click on the Save button. Now I've already saved this image in advance right here so I'm just gonna click on it and save over it. I'm calling the image Beautiful-sunset-with-Flatirons-in-Boulder-Colorado.jpg at which point I'll go ahead and click the Save button I'll be asked if I want to replace that file, I surely do, so I'll click on the Replace button. And now we're ready to post this cover photo on Facebook. So I'll go ahead and switch over to my browser at hand here. You want to make sure that you have a Facebook account of course, and that you're logged in, in which case you can go ahead and click on this Update Cover Photo button and then choose Upload Photo.

At least that's the way it works now. How it might work in the future I have no idea. But for now, you choose some form of upload command and then you want to navigate to your folder, and go ahead and select that file you just saved and click on the Open button. Now that's gonna take a few moments for Facebook to load that photo, and notice in my case, it comes in pretty darn dark, especially when you factor in this gradient darkness here at the bottom. So, I'm just gonna click on Cancel. And I'm gonna return to Photoshop, and I recommend you do this just about all the time when you're creating a cover photo.

So back here, in this image that we've been working on I'm gonna go up to the Layer menu, choose New Adjustment Layer, and choose Levels. I'm gonna go ahead and name this layer brighten let's say and click OK, and now go ahead and click in the center value, which is the Gamma Value, and I'll press shift up arrow twice in order to increase that value to 1.2 and now I'll just go ahead and hide the Properties Panel. Let's return to the File menu, and once again choose Save for Web. And then, because all my previous settings are just fine, I'll click on the Save button, I'll find that image that I want to save over here, and I'll go ahead and click the Save button and then click the Replace button to replace it.

All right now, let's go back to Facebook once again click on that Update Cover Photo button, choose Upload Photo, locate that file, click on the Open button, and wait a moment or two for the image to load inside Facebook. Now notice that Facebook invites you to Drag to Reposition the Cover. Our cover is already the right size in the first place, so all you need to do is kind of just click. And notice it will appear to hitch over a pixel or two regardless of which way you drag it, after which point you won't be able to drag it any more at all, so just go ahead and click on Save Changes and that's all a good thing by the way, that indicates that we have done a terrific job of scaling this image in the first place.

Now of course that profile picture still has the old background, so we need to update it as well. And that's a very easy thing to do. All you need to do is return to Photoshop, go back to that template image, and restore all the other layers by shift clicking on the Layer Mask for that Cover Layer and then alt or option click on the eye in front of the layer in order to bring back the other layers like so. Now go ahead and zoom in on your profile picture and so I'm assuming, you've got something going in advance. You have some sort of avatar that you've drawn that's against a transparent background, and it's integrated in to the cover photo but if you don't, you can either take advantage of my avatar if you like, or you can just take in to account what's happening here.

Now, what I'm gonna do is control click, or command click on the Layer Mask for that Profile Layer, and that'll just go ahead and load this square selection outline. At which point, I'll return to the Edit menu, and once again choose Copy Merged. Now, go ahead and press control n, or command n on the Mac once again in order to load the Size Settings for the contents of the Clipboard. Which should be a Width and Height Value of 960 Pixels a piece, at which point, you can go ahead and click OK. Then press control v, or command v on the Mac in order to paste said image in to place.

And press control e, or command e on the Mac in order to Merge the image with its' background. Now I'd like you to go up to the File menu and choose Save for Web once again. And this time, because this is such a graphical image I'm gonna switch the file format to PNG-24 and click on the Save button, and now I'm gonna go ahead and name this guy something like Me-on-sunset-background.png and I'll click the Save button in order to save that file. All right, now let's switch back to Facebook. And you might think, well wait a sec Deke, you brightened the cover photo using that Levels Adjustment Layer but you didn't do the same thing with the profile picture? And the answer is yes, I didn't.

Because unlike the cover photo, the profile picture is not automatically covered in the darkness of this gradient. All right, so I'll go ahead and click on Update Profile Picture like so, and then I'll click Upload Photo, and I'll choose this file right there, Me-on-sunset-background and I'll go ahead and click on the Open button in order to load it. Once again, it might take a moment or two for Facebook to load the image. At which point, you'll see this. Now even though the image is exactly sized the way it should be at 960 x 960 pixels, Facebook still sees fit to act like it's too big and it pretty much does that all the time regardless of how small you make the image.

What you want to do here is click on this little minus sign in order to zoom the image all the way out so it exactly fits, so no cropping is occurring in other words. And then go ahead and click Crop and Save. Do not crop the image, and definitely save it. And notice how perfectly aligned this profile picture is with the cover photo in the background. And that's how you create the perfect cover photo not to mention a perfect profile picture here on the most recent version of Facebook in 2015.

All right so, some pretty cool stuff, but that's only the beginning. Next week, I'm gonna show you how to truly integrate your profile picture in to your cover photo. Deke's Techniques each and every week. Keep watching.