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Creating An Optimal Facebook Cover Image In Photoshop - Video Tutorial
AUGUST 29, 2012

In this week's free video Deke McClelland shows you how to create a perfectly spaced, sized, and positioned Facebook cover photo. Sure, you could take your chances and upload a carefully selected photo for your cover image, then hope limited repositioning controls in Facebook let you adequately present your creative vision. Or you could watch this week's movie and find out how to craft your cover in Photoshop (CS6 free trial) ahead of time, to present a vision that's exactly what you want for your Facebook page.



The key to getting things positioned precisely is creating a template that allows you to plan your composition exactly. Specifically, here are the dimensions that you want:



Although the 851 x 315 dimensions of the standard Facebook cover is fairly common knowledge, the key to ultimately having your cover and the smaller inset profile picture work together with technical accuracy is to anticipate in Photoshop how the two will visually interact. In this project, Deke's goal is to have text that spans across the cover photo actually look as though it begins inside the smaller profile photo. (His kooky brush tiki man also spans across both images.) This requires some deft use of smart objects, layer masks, duplication, trimming, and of course, the Save for Web command. Here is the result of Deke's project:



Of course, you can extrapolate from this technique to create your own professionally crafted cover photo for your own personal or business page. And members of lynda.com can watch this week's exclusive video, in which Deke continues the project by showing you how he got his inset profile image to work as part of the larger cover photo, replete with letter D and the handle of the brush character positioned so that they flow from one image to the next.

You can get a free 7-day trial to the lynda.com Online Training Library. The trial membership entitles you to 7 days of access to all 986 courses in the lynda.com Online Training Library for free. Click sign up on the subscription plan of your choice to get started.

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