Facebook photos don’t have to be fuzzy
A huge problem with Facebook is that you upload a beautiful photo for your profile picture or a cover photo on your page to represent the awesomeness that is your brand, but when it is live for all to see, it has somehow become grainy. You’ve tried everything, even downloading free cover photos from services, thinking that would help, but as in the before/after image above, there is a distinct difference between what you see before and after you download your image to Facebook.
No matter the type of photo, you can do something about this. We gave you some pointers last year that improved the process but did not perfect it. AGBeat reader and designer Michael Bacon noticed that the images were still slightly fuzzy. We all know fuzzy leaves a bad first impression, especially if your industry is one that involves anything creative or marketing – you’re supposed to know how to put your best foot forward.
And now for the fix:
That said, Bacon discovered a way to fix fuzzy photos. He tells AG, “Facebook uses JPG compression of about ‘5’ in the quality setting which crunches the image up and is more the culprit as to why things look fuzzy / bad. What I have found is if you save your image from an image editing application like photoshop and don’t use the highest setting of “12” when you save the image JPG, rather save it to “10” FB seems to leave the compression setting alone and use the higher compression format.”
Bacon added, “I just did this with a cover image that was really high contrast / high color and it worked just fine. I had used the same image with its highest quality settings and exact pixel resolution for the FB cover image and it crunched it horribly… the “10” setting does add a little compression artifacting, but it’s pretty negligible and retains most of the image information. Seems like that’s the best way to get around the FB re-compression when uploading.”
Genius!
