FirstAction04b

[Damien Symonds]

Jump to next slide >>

Step 4: Sharpen

I almost always use Unsharp Mask. If you are not familiar with USM, I strongly encourage you to read my explanation here before too long.

Choose Filter > Sharpen > Unsharp Mask:

If you’re not too confident with USM yet, I advise these settings as a modest starting point for web sharpening – 200, 0.3, 1. Of course, every photo is a bit different, and we’ll discuss that later.

Step 5: Save

Choose File > Save for Web & Devices:

Or in newer versions of Photoshop, it's in File>Export:

There’s a lot of stuff in the SFW interface that doesn’t matter too much for our purposes. Only these four things are important:

• Jpeg format
• A nice high quality – 90 is ideal, but even 70 is good
• Embed Color Profile
• Convert to sRGB

When the Save dialog appears, navigate to the “Facebook Images Ready” folder that you made on your desktop back in Part 1.

Then immediately press Save. As before, don’t touch or alter the filename in any way.

Step 6: Close

Choose File > Close:

It will ask you if you want to save the changes. No, you don’t. This is just a duplicate of the original, remember – we don’t need to keep it.

When you close the duplicate image, you’ll be left with the original full-size image on your screen.

Stop recording >>