416 Extending your profile picture into your Facebook cover photo

- Hey gang, this is Deke McClelland. Welcome to Deke's Techniques. This week we're still in Facebook, and I'm gonna show you how to take this handsome devil right here that I drew with a Sharpie and colored inside Photoshop and we're gonna turn him into a profile picture and integrate him seamlessly as well as align him perfectly with the cover photo. Here, let me show you exactly how it works. Here's last week's profile picture which exists entirely inside of its 960 by 960 pixel frame, and here is this week's picture which violates the frame so that it exists partially inside of the profile picture image and partially out here, inside the cover photo.

I'm gonna go ahead and switch over to this image, in which I've drawn the creature in advance, and as you can see, it's a combination of a bunch of different layers working together. I'm gonna copy all those layers into the template by first pressing Ctrl Alt A or CMD OPT A on the Mac and that goes ahead and selects all the layers. Then I'm gonna combine them into a single smart object by first making sure that my rectangular marquee tool is selected and then I'll right click inside the image window and choose Convert to Smart Object, like so. Then I'll just go ahead and rename this guy Tree Me.

Then I'll right click inside the image window, again with the rectangular marquee tool, and I'll choose Duplicate Layer and I'll go ahead and send it to my template in progress, which is called Me against sunset.psd, and I'll click Okay. Now I'll go ahead and switch back to that image, and I'm gonna turn the profile layer off right here. Then with the Tree Me layer selected I'll go ahead and press the CTRL key or the CMD key on the Mac, and drag him down into the picture profile frame. I'm gonna move him a little lower, I think.

Someplace around here should work nicely, except for the fact that I don't have enough shoulder over here on the left-hand side of the image, but I can take care of that problem using the Liquify filter, which in PhotoShop CC can be applied to smart objects. I'll go up to the Filter menu and choose Liquify. Then I want to go ahead and zoom in to the lower left corner of the image. Make sure that the Warp tool is active, up here at the top of the Toolbox, and I'll press the right bracket key, if necessary, to increase the size of my brush. In my case, it's already pretty big, and what we need to do is drag until this shoulder is completely outside the image window, because this edge right here represents the edge of our template.

Now I'll click Okay to accept that change, and we end up with this much better effect, here. Next what you want to do, just to get a sense for how this composition is gonna look, go ahead and press the ALT key or the OPT key on the Mac, and drag this layer mask, the one that's assigned to the cover layer, go ahead and drag it up and drop it onto the Tree Me layer, and because you have the ALT or OPT key down, you'll get that little double arrow cursor, which is telling you that you're duplicating the layer mask on the fly, like so. This looks great to me, with the exception of this piece of his head that's coming out the upper right corner.

I'll just go ahead and select this region like so and with that layer mask selected, I'll press the D key in order to establish the default colors which when you're editing a mask means that the background color is black, and now I'll press CTRL Backspace or CMD Delete on the Mac, to fill that selection with black and mask that portion of the creature's head away. Now just click of the selection to deselect it and I'll zoom out a little bit here. Now we need to add the hand, which is available to us in yet another image, and notice that the hand comprises just two layers, both of which are currently selected in my case.

If they're not for you, just press CTRL ALT A or CMD OPT A on the Mac. Then I'll go ahead and right click on the hand and choose Duplicate Layers, and I'll send these layers to that same image, Me against sunset.psd, and I'll click Okay. Now I'll switch back to that image, like so, and I'll go ahead and CTRL drag or CMD drag that hand down until it's in front of these little people back here. I don't want to see them. I want to block them out of site, so I'll just go ahead and put this hand right about there, let's say. I'm gonna go ahead and group these two layers together as well by clicking on the Layers panel flyout menu icon and then I'm gonna choose New Group from Layers and I'll just go ahead and call this guy Hand, even though one of the layers is called Hand.

Who cares. That looks great. Now if you want to see how things are really gonna look then you can go ahead and duplicate that mask again by pressing the ALT key or the OPT key on the Mac and dragging that most recent layer mask up and dropping it onto the Hand group. That'll just go ahead and shave off that excess arm. Now we need to capture the cover photo. I'm gonna press CTRL zero or CMD zero on the Mac to zoom out. Then I'm gonna turn off that Interface Junk group right there so that we're no longer seeing the name or the buttons or the gradient, and I also want to get rid of this layer mask right here, because even though it looks good here on screen right now, for the sake of comping things in, it's not what we want for creating an actual cover photo.

I'll go ahead and right click on this layer mask, the one assigned to the Tree Me layer, and I'll choose Delete Layer Mask to get rid of it. That will allow this guy to come out of his boundary there. Now I'm gonna zoom in, and I need to mask section of head away, so I'll just go ahead and marquee it. I'm using the spacebar to move the marquee around. Once I get it more or less surrounded there, I'll go ahead and drop down to the Add Layer Mask icon at the bottom of the Layers panel and I'll ALT or OPT click on it in order to hide the selected region. You may worry about the fact that he's exceeding the frame just a little bit, he's kind of appearing in the middle of it.

That's not a problem at all because Facebook is going to automatically mask that area away. Now I'll go ahead and zoom back out and I want to unmask the background image by Shift clicking in the layer mask for that cover layer, like so. Now we need to load a selection that I've saved in advance as an alpha channel, so switch over to the Channels panel and press the CTRL key or the CMD key on the Mac, and click on the thumbnail for the full cover layer, in order to select this region right here. Then go up to the Edit menu and choose the Copy Merged command.

Now we need to send this guy to a new image. I'll press CTRL N or CMD N on the Mac. The Preset should be automatically set to clipboard and so you should see a width value of 5106 and a height value of 1890, which is too big of course, but we're gonna down sample things in just a moment, after you click Okay and then CTRL V or CMD V on the Mac in order to paste that image into place. Then you can switch back the Layers panel and press CTRL E or CMD on the Mac in order to merge the image with its background.

Now remember that we're gonna have a gradient along the bottom of this image as soon as Facebook converts the image to a cover photo. To prepare for that, let's go ahead and lighten the image a little bit by going up to the Layer menu, choosing New Adjustment Layer and choosing Levels. I'll go ahead and call this layer Brighten, like so, click Okay, and then click inside the gamma value and press Shift up arrow twice in a row. Now I'll hide the Properties panel. Then we'll go up to the File menu and choose Save for Web in order to save this image off, I'm suggesting as a JPEG file, as we're seeing right here, but did you notice I skipped a step? Notice how enormous this image is going to be.

It's got a width of 5106. It's way too large. So cancel out of here and then go up to the Image menu and choose the Image Size command. Make sure that Resample is turned on. If you want my recommendation, set interpolation to Bicubic (smooth gradients) as opposed to Bicubic (sharper). Make sure the width and height values are linked together and that you're looking at pixels here and then change that width value to 2048, like so. That will automatically reduce the height value to 758, which is exactly what we want. Go ahead and click Okay in order to apply that change, and now notice, if we go back to the File menu and choose the Save for Web command, that the dialog box is much more responsive and our image size, of course, has dropped down to 2048, which is what we want.

I've gone ahead and set the format to JPEG and the compression quality to very high. Make sure Convert to sRGB checkbox is turned on, then click Save, and I'm gonna go ahead and save over this guy right here, The legends of Tree Me are true and click the Save button and then click Replace, in order to create my new JPEG file. Now let's switch over to that dummy Facebook account, and as you can see, I'm all logged in, so all I need to do is click on the Update Cover Photo button right there and choose Upload Photo, and I'll find this image that I just saved off.

I'll click Open in order to open it up. It may take a few moments in order to load that image into Facebook. Then once it's loaded, you'll see this Drag to Reposition Cover. Just click it and the cover will move ever so slightly, and then go ahead and click the Save Changes button in order to save that cover. I stress that is the way things work inside Faceboook as I'm recording this movie. It's very possible that things will change in the future. Now I'm gonna switch back to Photoshop so that we can generate the profile picture.

I'll go ahead and bring up that template file, the Image in Progress. Then I'm gonna zoom in on my creature, right here. Notice this layer mask, the one the for the profile layer, that's just a square. Go ahead and press the CTRL key or the CMD key on the Mac, and click on it in order to load that 960 by 960 pixel square. Then go back to the Edit menu and once again choose Copy Merged. Now press CTRL N or CMD N on the Mac to bring up the new dialog box. You should see width and height values of 960 pixels a piece.

Click Okay, press CTRL V or CMD V on the Mac in order to paste the image, and then press CTRL E or CMD E on the Mac in order to merge it with its background. Now go back to the File menu, choose Save for Web. I'm gonna use the exact same settings as before. JPEG is the format. Very high is the quality setting. Convert to sRGB is turned on. Now you may ask me, "Well Deke, "why didn't we down sample the image "like we did with the cover photo?" And the reason is that the template is based on the size of the profile picture so it's already exactly the size it needs to be.

Just go ahead and click the Save button, and I'm gonna save over this guy, Closeup of the creature known as Tree Me. Then I'll click the Save button and click Replace in order to save off that file. Now let's go back to Facebook and click on Update Profile Picture right there, and you can see that I've done this a half dozen or so times before. I'm gonna go ahead and click on Upload Photo and find that file that I just saved. Now I'll click the Open button in order to open it on up. Now as you may recall from the previous movie, Facebook is gonna pretend that this is image is too darn big when it's really not.

All you want to do in order to fit it inside of this region, very important that it totally fits. You do not want to crop this image. Just go ahead and click on this minus sign right there. That's how it works in Facebook today, anyway, so that the image fits perfectly inside of its container and then click the Crop and Save button. You can see that we now have an integrated profile picture that precisely aligns to the cover photo and the background, and because we saved our images large, that is at 960 by 960 pixels where the profile picture is concerned, it looks great here, inside my Facebook timeline.

If you're a member of the Lynda.com online training library, I have a followup movie in which I show you the best way to post images to your Facebook timeline, and this pretty much tells you everything you need to know, but I explain things in more detail in the movie. If you're waiting for next week's free movie, I'm gonna show you how to take a piece of artwork made up exclusively of corner points in Illustrator, just by clicking around with a pen tool, and we're gonna convert them all to more organic smooth points with just one click. Deke's Techniques, each and every week.

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