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June 6, 2022
Question

How to compensate for Facebook compression of Covers? Extremely low quality

  • June 6, 2022
  • 3 replies
  • 1113 views

I use Photoshop to create social posts for Facebook and other platforms. (Used to use Spark too.)

Facebook has a new algorhyth that now compresses all Covers regardless if they're sized correctly. On PS I've tried saving as PNG and webP and they are equally horrible once posted. **The images are scaled appropriately and are less than 100kb.

I read a blog suggesting to double the size so that when it compresses it won't look as wretched.

I did this, it looked passably better but it wasn't scaled properly and was too tall.

Rather than continue to play with the dimensions, has anyone found the silver bullet?

 

I'm an old school designer who learned during the days of exacto knives, rapidographs, and hot wax. I try to keep up with the tech side but for me it's just so that I can design. I know enough to be dangerous. lol.

I used to post regularly for a client on FB and it always looked crisp and sharp. I was horrified when I posted and it looked muddy and heavily pixelated.

I'm on an iMac 12.3.1 and up to date with CC PS.

PS BTW, it looks atrocious if I do it on the new Express. It looks horrible post production before I even posted so I immediately jumped on PS. That's another post how Adobe killed Spark, I used to create great images for social platforms and now they're all blury and muddy. It was fast, easy and fun. Quality now is horrible, features have been removed, blah blah blah.  😞 


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3 replies

Participant
May 23, 2024

Very interesting👀👀👀🔗🤑

joyharrison
Participant
May 23, 2024

Did you find a solution to this problem? Im having same issue.

D Fosse
Community Expert
Community Expert
June 6, 2022

I'm not sure it's facebook, it's more likely your web browser and your retina screen (I assume you have that). This is the downside of retina screens on the web.

 

Every web browser and image viewer, when they detect a retina/high resolution screen, will scale raster images up 2x. Instead of one image pixel being represented by one screen pixel, each image pixel is now represented by four screen pixels.

 

Effectively, it turns your high resolution screen into a low resolution one.

 

This is the industry standard workaround to ensure that the same images can be used everywhere, regardless of what screen technology the user happens to have. If it wasn't for this scaling, all images would appear like tiny thumbnails on your retina screen.

 

Photoshop doesn't do this scaling. It displays accurately 1:1.

June 6, 2022

Hi, thanks for replying.

 

It's definitely a Facebook issue, if you search about Cover image quality there's a lot of chatter.

 

Regular posts are fine, IG, and Twitter posts are fine.

 

On PS and my iMac, iPad, cover image looks great. Once I put it on Facebook it looks awful, on all devices that the cover image displays, truly awful.

 

When I followed the advice of a designer's blog and doubled the dimensions, it looked much better--see my original post.

 

In my quest for best practices for the current FB algorithms and settings people said the usual work around a to get a good quality FB cover were failing since FB tweaked their algorithms and are compressing all cover images.

 

This is a recent development, I've never had image quality issues like this with FB covers.

 

It's only the cover image, same image is automatically posted on the page's feed and looks crisp and bright. The same image in the cover looks fuzzy, pixelated, muddy, and the text almost unreadable.

 

When enlarged, the post image retains its quality. The same image on the cover looks awful.

 

Hopefully, FB gets enough feedback they address it. I'll continue to play with it ro find a solution. 

It's disappointing to have to waste so much time on tweaking the file for the cover.