testing 1, 2, 3…

Last week I met with Josiah and Tari to shoot some couples portraits in downtown San Diego.  Here are a few favorites:

Downtown San Diego Portrait Photography

Downtown San Diego Portrait Photography

Downtown San Diego Portrait Photography

This is a tutorial on how to make your Facebook page look like this:

Note that this does require that you have upgraded to the “new” Facebook layout.  If you are fluent in Photoshop this should be relatively easy.  If you are a customer of ours and you’d like to do something like this, send me a message and I’ll see if I can’t whip something up for you.

1.  Open Facebook in your browser.  Set a vertical photo as your main profile pic that is 180 pixels wide by 532 pixels tall (you should already know how to do this).

2.  Make sure it takes up your browser window is maximized so that it takes up your whole screen and get a screen capture.  This is easily done by hitting ALT-PRTSCRN.

3.  Go to Photoshop, CTRL-N to create a new document. 

4.  CTRL-V to paste the screen shot into your document.

5.  Grab the Slice Tool (it’s with the Crop Tool).  Click and drag around the six areas that we’ll want to use – the big verticle profile pic and the five horizontal tagged photos going across.

6.  Once you have the six areas “sliced” then open the photo that you want to use on your Facebook page, hit CTRL-A (select all) and CTRL-C (copy)…can you tell I like keyboard shortcuts? LOL

7.  Go back to the newly sliced image and CTRL-V (paste) your photo onto it.  Then you’ll want to CTRL-T (transform) your photo so that it’s the right size and in the right position over the six windows.  This is the key – you have to find an image that works well for the position of the six openings, and you have to get your photo in the best position/size for the layout.  Note that if you hold the SHIFT key down as you are resizing with the Transform tool, the aspect of your photo will stay the same.

8.  Click File > Save for web and devices.  Once that window opens set it to Jpeg (top right) and set quality to 100%. 

9.  Hit the Save button at the bottom, and on the next screen change the Slices dropdown to “All User Slices”.

10.  Hit Save and PS will save all six of the windows you’ve created as six different JPGs.

11.  Upload the six images to Facebook.

12.  Set the big verticle image as your main profile pic.

13.  Very important – tag yourself in the five horizontal images that go across, but you need to go right to left.  So the image that you want to be on the far right should be tagged first, and the one on the far left tagged last.  This took some playing with when I was doing it, if you mess up just untag yourself from the photos and start over.  You don’t have to delete them off of Facebook, just untag and retag.

That’s it!  If you end up doing this to your Facebook page, let me know at www.facebook.com/cofphoto

Enjoy!