Tutorial: Saving and Sizing Your Images for Blogging

This tutorial will show you how to resize and save your photos in Photoshop so they are sharp, crisp, and perfectly sized for your blog.

If you’ve ever posted photos on your blog or Facebook, you may have noticed they are not as crisp and clear as the original image.

This is especially frustrating if you’ve spent time editing the photo, only to have it not show up as well in the image you are sharing with everyone!

In my last photoshop tutorial, I showed you how I edit my photos. I almost always do these two steps:

1. Sharpen

2. Run an action (usually Fresh & Colorful from the Pioneer Woman actions)

But if I’m going to be sharing these images here on the blog (or Facebook or email) there’s one more thing I do to get them ready.

1. Determine How Big Your Photos Should Be.

Left: Internet Explorer. Right: Firefox.

Most blogs are between 400 and 600 px wide. This blog is 600 px. To determine the width of your blog, right-click on a photo that’s already on your blog. From the menu that pops up, click on Properties (if using Internet Explorer) or View Image Info (if using Firefox).

Left: Internet Explorer. Right: Firefox.

Look at the Dimensions. The number on the left is how wide the image is. This image of my Cookies ‘N Cream Oreo Fudge Brownies is 600 px wide. That means we’ll want to resize our images for this blog to 600 px wide.

2. Resize.

Open the image in Photoshop and edit to your liking. For this image, I did a sharpen, Fresh & Colorful, then ran the Topaz Adjust Color Blast filter. Love that filter for fall pics! :)

When you’re done editing, click on Image > Image Size…

Change the width to 600 (or whatever your size is) and click OK.

Great! Now it’s the right size, but it’s not quite as sharp as the original image…

3. Sharpen.

First click CTRL-J to create a duplicate layer.

Then click on Filter > Smart Sharpen…

Change to these settings:

Amount: 60%

Radius: 0.4

And click OK.

Perfect! If it looks too sharp, you can always adjust the opacity until it looks right. (Another reason to always make a duplicate layer.)

4. Save.

Now we’re ready to save. Click on File > Save for Web & Devices…

From the screen that pops up, make sure you are saving as a JPEG and that the qualityis around 60. That’s a high enough quality for the picture to still look good, but not so huge that it will take forever to load on your page! :)

Here’s the before….

And then after we sharpened:

Or roll your mouse over the image below to see the before and after!

It’s subtle. Look at the eyes…

Note: You’ll need to be here on the blog for this to work, not reading from the email or RSS feed.

That’s all there is to it! :)