How to prevent your social media photos looking blurry
So you’ve chosen a phone or camera that has a high mega pixel number thinking it will help you take great photos, spent care setting up your photo, then you’ve taken the photo and uploaded it to Facebook, only to find out that it looks blurry and out of focus….arrggghh! How frustrating!
Social media has many frustrating things (and many good things), but one of the most frustrating is when you expect one thing, and you get something else. Social media (especially Facebook) has so much data to store that it has developed a way to compresses your photos so that they are smaller files. The problem with this is that it ruins the quality of your photo. If the photo is downloaded, saved or screenshot, and re-uploaded over and over the resulting file is even worse.
The most common problem that makes Facebook compress a file is when the original file is too big. Your 20 megapixel file would be great if you wanted to print an enlargement for a huge banner, but it’s not suitable for most everyday uses. The example below shows what that compression does to your photo (left), and how re-sizing it correctly will keep it sharp and clear (right). To re-size your photos yourself is not as easy as you might think, and you can’t turn off Facebook’s compression. Mobile devices don’t usually allow you to easily re-size your photos, and it’s not just a matter of cropping it smaller. Your photo needs to be saved with a certain set of pixel dimensions as well as resolution to end up with a photo that is sharp and clear. The industry standard for doing this is to use Adobe Lightroom or Photoshop.
When you hire Jannette Fulham Photography for your promotional, real estate, and corporate portraits, you will be supplied with both high resolution and web-sized files. The high resolution files are needed for printing enlargements, such as signs and banners, and the web-sized files are correctly sized files for social media, and small printed documents. Correctly sized files will make your job easier because they upload faster, load quicker when viewing, and look sharp and clear.
To have some great photos created for your business, please contact me today for a quote.
