Creating Social Media Graphics with Photoshop

Even though it is called Photoshop, it is also a design program, and when we want to combine photos and type and graphics together, if it's for things like digital, for video, for web, Photoshop can be a good place to create designs. So let's shift gears here a little bit and see how to create a graphic. In this case it'll be used for social media, but the same kind of fundamental things would apply even if you're doing print work, and it would just be a different size and you'd be working in CMYK color instead of RGB color.

Now we do need to figure out how big this graphic is going to need to be. When we create a new file, either by clicking new file or file new, we have a variety of presets depending on how we're going to use it. So for example, there's film and video things, which are wide aspect ratios.

There's mobile devices if you're doing user interface design, but really you should be using something like Figma for that. There are web, which really this is kind of more on-screen digital experiences even though they say it's web. There are print dimensions, so eight and a half by eleven and so forth.

Photo sizes, you know, with your four by six or five by sevens. But if we're going to go to digital, web is kind of a nice thing even though we're not necessarily saying it's a website or something. We are going to put a social media graphic on the internet, on the web, so we can choose that.

And there are some main presets here, but we can click view all to see even more. But they don't have social media sizes built in here, which would be very useful if they did. So we do have to know how big we want this to be.

That can change over time. So what I would say is if you're trying to figure out how big to make something, just do a Google search for social media image sizes, and you will quickly find this website here, which I've also linked in the workbook as well. This Sprout Social, it's always up to date, so they're always updating this very frequently if things change.

And in here you can see for all of the various social media networks, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, now called X, YouTube, TikTok, all of those different things. There are a variety of different sizes for different things depending on what you want to do. Are you creating a profile picture? Are you creating one for a page? Are you creating a cover photo, a shared image, all different sizes.

And so ultimately they're going to give you a pixel size, so a pixel width and height for those things. So you need to find out the dimensions, and then you can create an image with those pixel dimensions. So I'm going to go ahead and close that.

In this case, we're going to be doing one that is 1200 pixels by 630, and you can just keep the resolution at 72 pixels per inch. It doesn't matter. Resolution is a print concept, so it does not mean anything for digital things.

All that matter is the pixel width and pixel height. We are measuring things in pixels. We're not doing inches or things like that, which is a print concept.

And for anything that is on your screen with the primaries of light, we're doing RGB color as opposed to CMYK, which would be for print. And we could use a different background color if we wanted to. There's a menu here where you can click on this, but white background is fine for this because we actually want it to be a light background.

So I'm going to go ahead and click create, and it creates that document here. Now one thing is, notice it has this artboard. Artboards are good if you're doing like multi-page documents like a website or something, which again, I would not design a website here in Photoshop.

You should use something like Figma for. I forgot to uncheck the checkbox for artboard. It kind of makes certain things a little bit harder to tweak or change when you're just doing a single document like this.

So I'm actually going to close that and recreate it. It's actually a good thing because you can see what that artboard is like, and I'm going to choose the same size. It actually comes up here with the last size I chose, but I'm going to simply uncheck artboards, and then when I hit create, now it's just a simple size.

I don't have that extra artboard that kind of gets in the way of things, and there we have our size. I'm going to zoom in on this so I can see this a bit better. I'm going to say fit on screen, and I can start to bring my photos, my logos, add my type.

I can bring all of that stuff in. Now to bring all of that stuff in, I have a little project folder that I'm going to be working out of. So in my Photoshop class here, I just switched to my desktop here.

I've got a social media post folder, and in that folder, I've got a finished version of this so we can see what we're going to be creating in the end. This is what it's going to look like. We're going to have a large photo with some type and a logo, so that's kind of the vision of where we're going with this.

So you kind of have an idea of what we have planned for creating this, but we have a logo. This is an Adobe Illustrator file. We also have a jpeg, so this is a photo, and generally speaking, your logos are going to be Adobe Illustrator files, or they might be SVG files, scalable vector graphics.

Sometimes you will get things like a PNG. Ideally, if you can get the vector-based version, that will be better. It'll be more flexible when it comes to scaling, but you want to kind of get these things together from your client that you're working with, collect those assets, and then we want to bring them into our design and put them together.

So when I bring this photo in here in Photoshop, there are a variety of ways that I can bring it in. Now, one of the problematic ways to bring it in is by just opening it and copying and pasting. We're going to be using Place Embedded, which is going to be a better option, but let me show you the problem with just copying and pasting.

So if I were to open this photo, I want to crop in on just this little portion of this, right? Now, this is a big photo. If we look down here at the bottom left, it says 6016 pixels. That's the dimensions of this.

Now, if you remember, my other file was only 1200 pixels, so this is massively bigger. It's like almost six times the size. You can also go to Image and look at Image Size, and you can see your pixel dimensions there as well.

So if you look at these pixel dimensions here, ignore the inches down here. These pixel dimensions, 6000 pixels. So this is really large.

So one of the first issues is when I select all of these pixels, if I were to copy them and then come over here and paste them, this is very, very large. In fact, so large that all I'm seeing is this top little teeny portion here. I can't even see all of this because it's so far away.

So I could fix that by either trying to drag with my move tool here. I could try to drag up so I can start to see some things. Okay, so I start to see it.

I could also transform it to make it smaller. So I could go in and do a free transform. So I could say free transform here, and if I zoom out, which I'd have to zoom out quite a lot to see those transform handles because it's so big, when I scale it down, I could scale it down, and it's getting better.

I could get it to about the size I want, and I could zoom back in so I can see things a little bit better as I'm doing my crop. But one of the downsides to copying and pasting is you get a regular pixel-based layer, and that pixel-based layer is at this current size. So when I accept that by double-clicking on that, I've locked in this size, meaning all those 6,000 pixels that I had in the beginning, they're all now converted down to this size.

So that means if I do another free transform, or if you're showing the transform handles, you could just transform it right away. Personally, I kind of get distracted with the transform handles, so I like to turn those off personally. And then when I want to transform, when I want to scale, that's when I go in and say free transform, and then they appear only when I want to.

So let's say I made this small because I'm thinking, well, yeah, I really want it to be small, and then I decide to change my mind, and I'm like, no, I want to make it big again. The problem is it resampled or recalculated the pixels at this size, which means that when I go back to free transform, it thinks this is the current 100% size. It thinks this is the original.

It does not know that it was originally a much larger image. And so when I scale this up, and then I look closer, look at the lack of quality, because when I resampled it small, it threw away tons of quality. It got rid of those pixels, recalculated them at that small size, and then when I enlarged them, it was just blowing up a few pixels.

You have to be very careful with enlarging pixel-based graphics. See, once again, if I do another free transform, just imagine if I make this really small, where in the end, I only have a few pixels in my file to represent this. It has been recalculated to that size.

And now when I enlarge it again, when I go back to free transform, it is enlarging those few pixels, and I have just lost all of my detail. So that's what we have to be very careful about when sizing our images, is using a regular pixel-based layer. I don't want that, because I don't want to lose my quality, but I still want to play with my size.

I don't know exactly how big I want this to be. So I'm going to drag this to the trash and get rid of it. It's a bad thing.

So I'm not going to copy and paste. I am going to place. Now, if I place as a link, I will need to retain that JPEG file on my computer, and if I send somebody this Photoshop file, I'd also need to send them the JPEG as well.

I think that's kind of a hassle in most situations. So I'd rather embed this photo, which means to make a copy in this Photoshop file. By placing embedded, which I think should be the typical default that you're going to use most of the time, it just means that everything is sitting in this Photoshop file.

There'll be a copy added to this Photoshop file, but that way I could send you or someone else this Photoshop file, and inside of it, the photo that I place, the JPEG, will be in there. I don't also have to send you the JPEG as well. I just send you one Photoshop file.

So it's just easier for most workflows to place embedded. Place just means to import, and so when I choose that now and I place it in here, first of all, it sized it down automatically. That's way easier.

It's 15 percent of its original size, so it actually knows how big it was. So even if I double click on that to accept that current size, behind this is a copy of the full high-res original, and that means that at any point I can free transform and it remembers, hey, there's a lot more image here. This is only 15 percent of its full size, so I can make this bigger here, and I can place this, and I can size it here.

I can get it to be exactly what I want it to be, but if I go a little too big or a little too small, I don't have to worry about losing quality because as long as I don't go bigger than the original, which would be 100 percent, I'm way smaller than 100 percent, so you can go to 100 percent or you can even go a little bit bigger. It won't lose too much quality, but as long as I don't go much bigger than 100 percent, as long as I'm smaller than that, I know my quality is going to be fine. So it's using the original full high-res image behind here, and it's always looking crisp and clean and wonderful, and it doesn't matter how many times I do a free transform.

I can go big, I can go small, I can go big and small. As long as your final size is 100 percent or less, your quality will be fine. Now, one downside to this, well, there's actually a couple.

When I save this Photoshop file, this social media image, let me save as, and I'm going to save it into here as Dan's Facebook post. I'm going to save it as a Photoshop file. Save.

That Photoshop file is bigger than it would be if you had just copied and pasted. When you copy and paste, it doesn't increase the file size as much as a Smart Object. So Smart Objects do increase your file size.

Now, that doesn't mean they make them huge, but they do increase it bigger than if you didn't use a Smart Object. To me, that's a small price to pay for the editability and the flexibility of it. So, but that is just one downside to keep in mind.

It does increase your file size. I think it's well worth it, so it's not a problem to me, but that is one downside. The other downside is if you wanted to do any retouching on this as well.

If you want to retouch it, you can't change it here. So, for example, if I go to try to paint on it, I can't paint here because this is just a preview of the original pixels. It's not the actual original pixels.

To see those, I would have to double click and it would say, hey, I have to open this up for you. I'm going to open it up as a separate window, and when you're done, do a file save to commit to those changes. It's not going to show you this again, so in the future, you'll have to remember to save those changes.

Notice now I have this. Now, this is a copy. This is not editing the original one, because remember, I placed embedded, so I'm editing an embedded copy.

The changes that I make here would stay here only in this Photoshop file. This would not alter the one that is on my computer because this is a copy that I'm working on, but I could go in and let's say make a change here. Let's say I paint with a black mark here, and I would just save that change.

JPEG options come up. You just hit okay to those. When you come back here, notice that change gets updated.

That is one downside that you can't edit in this window that you have to edit in a separate window. If I undo and then I save those changes and I come back, notice how it updates. That is another downside that you have to edit in a separate window, but again, the benefit of this is when it comes to laying things out and playing with size, you don't have to worry about losing quality with a smart object.

If you are going to be laying things out, positioning it, sizing it, trying to figure all those things out, and you don't know exactly the locked in size, you want to be able to play around with it, smart objects are the way to go. Now, smart objects, that is what it creates when you do a place embedded. Place embedded is really saying let's create a smart object by embedding a file, and it creates this smart object.

It's smart because it maintains that original embedded copy of it. Smart objects can be pixel-based smart objects, or they can be vector based. When you place embedded, you can place in pixel-based files like JPEGs, PNGs, other Photoshop documents, but you can also place Illustrator files, and those are vector smart objects.

The benefit of that is you've got an editable vector graphic backing up this smart object, and the beauty of vector graphics is you can make them any size you want with no loss of quality. So unlike a pixel-based graphic where when you enlarge it, you lose quality, and it becomes blurry, and you lose detail as you enlarge, vector graphics are always crisp and clean no matter how big you make them. That's why ideally logos are saved as vector graphics and created as vector graphics.

So I'm going to place this in, and here we have the original vector. Now, unlike a pixel-based graphic where we have to be 100% or smaller, this one is perfectly fine to go even bigger, and when you accept that size by double-clicking on it, it will be at the highest resolution that this file allows. Now, when you zoom in, you will see pixels because you are in a pixel-based file, but that doesn't mean that it is pixel-based.

When I make this smaller, it does not get re-rendered at those pixel sizes and lose quality. There are vectors behind this, so I can make this bigger and bigger and bigger, and when I look closely, yes, I will see pixels, but when you view this at a normal size, when you view this at, let's say, 100% size, you do not see the pixels at a normal size. So behind the scenes, you've got this beautiful vector graphic, so you can make this any size you want just by doing a free transform, which is Command-T or on Windows, Control-T, and I can size this to be whatever size I want, and if I want to edit that original vector graphic, just like we did by double-clicking on the pixel-based graphic that's a smart object, we can double-click on the vector smart object.

They both look like little smart objects here. I'm going to actually go in and make my panel options a little bigger so you can see those thumbnails just a little bit better, and you see this little icon right here indicates that that is a smart object. If I were to double-click on this smart object, it's actually going to launch Adobe Illustrator because we don't actually edit vectors in Photoshop, we edit vectors in Illustrator, so now that we're in Illustrator, we can make any changes to the original vectors that we want, so let's say I select my colors here and change it to something else.

Now, just like we had done when we were in Photoshop, it did say we have to save when we're all done, so if I say File-Save, that saves the copy that was placed into Photoshop because we did Place Embedded, so that created a copy. This did not change the original that's sitting on my computer. That one is still black.

Then when I go back to Photoshop, notice how it updates. So again, whenever you have a smart object and you want to make a change, whether it's pixel-based or vector-based, you double-click, it sends you either to the original file in Photoshop or the Illustrator, but it's going to open up that original file with all of its resolution or if it's vector graphics with all of its original vector graphics. See here, when I zoom in, notice these are always crisp and clean because in Illustrator, these vector graphics are always crisp and clean.

You can make whatever change it is that you want, but when you're done, you have to save and it saves those changes back into your Photoshop file, and so when you go back to Photoshop, notice how the change is made. So to sum, to summarize all this, when we place, we can place pixel-based or vector-based files, and when we place them in, they become a smart object, which is smart in the sense that we can size it endlessly, make it bigger, make it smaller with no loss of quality. It preserves the original editing capabilities and it really helps when you're doing designs that you want to import a bunch of different assets into one Photoshop file.

The file that we're working with is a Photoshop file which maintains all of those layers, so when I save this Photoshop file, if I were to open that back up again, you still maintain all of your smart objects, all of your layers, all of that stuff which is embedded as a copy inside of that Photoshop document. Now the last part of this is to add some type, so I'm going to zoom to fit this on my screen and I want to add some type over here, which I could do using my type tool. When I select my type tool, I can click into my document where I want to make that type.

I'm going to start typing in, so this is going to be a Labor Day sale. Now it's a little bit small and it's not positioned where I want, so as I change the sizes and things, I want this to be centered so that eventually once I do get this positioned exactly right, I know it's not quite centered over that logo, but as long as it's centered, when I go in and change the size, it'll stay centered on that particular position. Now you can change some things here in this little overlay, but also all of the options are up here, plus some more.

I should say, I shouldn't say these are all of the options, these are some of the options, but more options are in your character panel. If I click on that character panel, that'll open up. These are all of the options between our character and paragraph options.

These are all of those type settings, but the most common things here are in your options bar, but one nice little thing that you can do here, aside from using the menu to play with different sizes, so I can make it a little smaller or a little bigger, is to drag on the icon. So if you go to the icon and drag left or right, you can scrub through these values. That's really nice to be able to play to figure out what size you want.

Now you can choose various different fonts, of course, so you can go in here and actually as you hover over, notice how you will get a preview of that particular font. So you can find the font that you would like. If you know the name of the font that you would like, you can just start typing it in.

So say I know I want Ariel, I can start typing in Ariel, and then here are all of the Ariel fonts. If I know that I want a Helvetica, for example, I can just start typing Helvetica, and then here are all the Helvetica fonts. Once you have chosen a family of fonts, all of your different weights will be available here, if they are available for that particular family.

Not all fonts have a bunch of different weights. Some will have more or less, depending on that particular font family. So if I choose, for example, Helvetica, which you might not have all the same fonts that I have, but if you choose that, this has more weights.

Sometimes you don't even have an italic, sometimes you just have a regular and that's it. So when you then size it down to what you want, let's say, I think I want something about like so, I can use my move tool here. So I'll choose my move tool and I can drag it into position the way I want.

Notice the smart guides will appear to help me line up with other things. I'm going to make my other piece of type and then let's say we align them all together as well. I'm going to make it with another type layer.

So this, notice, became a type layer. And if I use my type tool to click into that layer, I can edit that layer. When I'm done, if I leave the tool, then I'm kind of done with that.

And I can come back to the type tool. And when I click again, notice how it creates another piece of type. Generally, if you're doing different font formats, while you can put them all into one big type layer, if you want to move them around and position them differently from each other, let's say with your move tool, if you want to be able to freely move them about, make them different type layers.

Also notice that I'm not dragging to make my piece of type. So when you make your piece of type, you can either drag to make a box and then it fills that box. So if you're doing a paragraph, that can be good.

But the way that I'm doing it is, and let me just drag that to the trash, because I want to get rid of that. I am just clicking. And when you click, it's good if you just want like a single line of type, or if you want one line and then you want to hit return and add in a second line where you decide where you want to hit return.

Just click instead of dragging. This way, I don't have to worry as I'm sizing this about a containing box, because this kind of type does not have a containing box. The containing box is good for flowing type when you have a paragraph where you want things to wrap from one line to the next.

These are meant to be just single lines of type. So I don't want that containing text box. I'm going to make this thicker, bolder.

So I'm going to go and choose a bold. I'm going to also make this much larger. And I think there's too much space between those lines.

I don't see a setting here for that. So I'm going to go into my character panel by clicking a little button here. You can also find those character panels by going up here and choosing character under window.

And here we've got our leading. So leading is the amount of space between our lines. Back in the days of metal typography, when people were printing, they put strips of lead in between their lines of type.

So we call that leading. Some design apps will call it line height, but here they call it the traditional leading. And so I can reduce that space between those lines by adjusting that leading space here.

So we've got our font size and our leading amount. And I can use my move tool to position it. And when I want to position kind of all of these to each other, so let's say you have these in different places.

Notice that right now I'm in auto select. Auto select means I can just click on a layer and it will sense the thing that I'm over and it will automatically select it when I click. If you do not have auto select on, then you must select the layer and it will only move what you have selected in your layers panel, which means you'd have to switch your selection there to be able to move something.

If something is hard to grab, that's actually nice because sometimes when things are very small, they're kind of actually hard to grab. So sometimes I like auto select on, especially if I'm very quickly switching between things that are easy to select. But if something is difficult to click on, turn it off, choose your layer here, and then you can drag anywhere in the file and that particular layer will be moved when you drag anywhere.

You don't actually have to aim for it. I think in a case like this, auto select is actually kind of nice, so I will leave auto select on. And let's say that I have these kind of misaligned and I want them all to be lined up to each other, not the photo, just the logo and the type.

I can click on one, hold shift, click on the other, and notice how they all get highlighted, all the in-betweens. And then I can come up here in my move tool. I can see my alignment options and I could do a left align, a center align, a right align.

I want to do a center align and they center to each other. And then I can position them all. So with them all selected, I can drag them all at the same time.

Let's say to here. I can also use my arrow keys. So if I want to nudge this up, I can use my arrow keys to nudge this up when I'm in the move tool to position that as well.

If I want to change the color of this type, I can use my type tool to select that type and I can choose my color box up here or down here. Either one is fine. I can click on that and then I can sample colors and I can sample them from anywhere in my file.

Notice that when I have this color box open, I get an eyedropper tool that I can simply click on something to sample that color to get the color that I'm looking for. Let's say a medium color like this. I'll hit OK and now I have that color.

When it comes to smaller type like this that is especially thinner type. So let's say I go to my selection tool, type selection tool here and I make this smaller and it's a thin small type. Sometimes because this is pixel based, it can start to break up and become pixelated or blurry.

Now you should make this judgment at 100%. If things look fine, then it looks okay. But I'm going to zoom in so you can see this a bit better here.

Let's zoom into as big as it can be just for you to see this better. I'm going to use my type tool. I'm just going to click into that type area there.

There are some different anti-aliasing here. Anti-aliasing are how it decides to create those pixels from the vector type because type is vectors. So how does it turn that into pixels if there is no anti-aliasing? Anti-aliasing is the blurring or smoothing of edges so that it looks nice on a pixel based file or screen.

And since this is dedicated to being destined to be on screen, we're going to put this on Facebook. We definitely want there to be some anti-aliasing. This does not look good with no anti-aliasing.

But there are different qualities of anti-aliasing where it can decide, is it going to fill a pixel? Is it not going to fill a pixel? So there's no real right or wrong answer here when I'm choosing these. But as I do these, just look at the appearance of the type and how it can be a little different depending on the one you choose. Now I'm on a Mac, so I'll see the Mac ones.

If you're on Windows, you'll see some different options down here. But the ones above the line here, everybody will see these. And something like strong, see how that thickens the type up just a little teeny bit.

And so how sharp versus crisp. If I zoom in especially, so you can see this a little bit different. Some of these might be subtle.

And like I said, you're really going to see it on the smaller type. So I'm going to go even a little bit smaller here. Let's look at the difference between sharp and crisp.

Look at the A for example. Look at how it's harder to read here. It's easier to read there.

But strong makes it even thicker. It thickens things up just a little bit. So whichever one looks best to your eye, which is legible, keeps the shapes of the type good, has the thickness that you want.

There's no real right or wrong here as long as it looks good to you. But this can affect how vectors get rendered into pixels because that's what type is. It's fundamentally vectors.

So this is a type specific thing of how does it render the type. You won't notice this really much of a difference on a big type. So if I try to do this on the large type, you're really not going to notice too much of a difference.

Yes, there might be a little bit of a difference in is a line sharp or not. But strong doesn't really show that much of a difference because it's not thickening up that much because it's already thick to begin with. So you're really going to notice it more on the smaller type.

Not to say you won't see it to some extent, but really focus on if your small thin type doesn't look very good, consider trying a different kind of anti-aliasing up here and that'll create a better looking type. Do your final judgment at 100%. Make sure that you like the way that it looks.

If you don't, then you can go back in. Let's say I think this needs to be bigger. Of course, I can make this bigger and make it the way that I like.

Now, the final file that I want needs to be something that I can post on Facebook. This is just a Photoshop file. Earlier, we did a save as, we saved our Photoshop file, but Facebook does not accept Photoshop files.

So it would accept either a PNG or a JPEG that it would accept. So if I want to upload this to Facebook, I would need to export this as, and I could either do either a JPEG or a PNG. The PNG is going to be probably a bigger file size.

It's 521K, but it is the best quality. You can't go wrong with a PNG, 521K. JPEG, smaller file, it would upload faster.

Just make sure that you don't compress it, that you don't go with a low quality. Because if you go with a low quality, you will lose literal detail and quality. It does not look very good.

You want to make sure that this is the highest quality. I would go all the way to seven because Facebook or social media, they will compress it more. So you don't want to pre-compress it because then you're going to get a double compression and that will worsen your quality because you get basically get double compressed.

So go with the highest quality. It's 302K. It's still going to be looking great on something like Facebook.

But you can't go wrong with either a PNG generally or a very high quality JPEG, but the JPEG will upload just a little bit faster. As long as your social media supports either format, either one would be good to go with. Just don't do a heavily compressed format because social media will, again, recompress it.

And so this final file here, I can export and that will be the final file. So I'm going to export this here into my social media posts. The Photoshop is for me to come back to in the future to make changes and that JPEG or PNG is what I can post onto social media.

So in the end, I've got something that has editable type and I can size with good quality my photo, my Adobe Illustrator file. I can make changes to those if necessary. And so this is a way that we can work smarter with smart objects rather than working harder.

Go ahead and do exercise 1D in the book to try this yourself.