What are some settings I should check before making a social media graphic?

[Guest]

Hi all,

My goal is to create a graphic for a social media post. It will contain an image, text, and graphics. I'll set up the dimensions per the recommendation of the social media site. 

What are some settings I should check upon my document setup or export so the text doesn't appear fuzzy on the web?  I will set the color mode to RGB. 

Thanks for any insight!

[Lumigraphics]

Scaling an image up or down in Photoshop can result in loss of sharpness and quality. Is this going to just be one specific size?

[Leslie Moak Murray]

I second what @Lumigraphics said. I make my Instagram posts larger than necessary for this reason. Scaling the size down can increase sharpness, but you cannot make an image larger in Photoshop without loss of quality. Then you export for Web, and it should look fine.

[Guest]

Thanks! I'm sorry if I'm not understanding, what do you mean by scaling down? My plan is to set the dimenions of my document per the recommendations of the social media site, and then export.

[Lumigraphics]

Scaling down does not always work well, especially for text. You can end up with unreadable text.

I'm just trying to find out, is there one finished size or are you creating muitlple graphics of different sizes?

[Guest]

I am creating one graphic for one post. I'm not sure if this answers the question though, thanks! 

[Lumigraphics]

Create it at the finished size.

[Guest]

I will have to do some research. Thank you.

[Mohammad.Harb]

Always start with the Exact specific dimensions, Export as JPG with Embded sRGB color profile. 

[Lumigraphics]

PNG, WebP, HEIC, or AVIF may be better choices, depending on the content and hosting platform.

Can you post the site's recommendations?

[Leslie Moak Murray]

Various sites have different size requirements. That is why I recommended making one post in a large size that can be reduced as needed.  This way, you only need to do it once instead of making three or four of the same image in different sizes. I am not talking about reducng a file from 5,000 px to 1080.

[Guest]

I'm reading different recommendations across the web, so I'm not entirely sure, but I think 1080 x 1080 pixels will work. 

[Leslie Moak Murray]

Yes, that works for Instagram.

[Conrad_C]

If you have small text and aren’t happy with it, try different anti-alias settings for it as shown below. Pick the anti-alias method that’s the most readable at 100% magnification. (If your computer display is Retina/HiDPI resolution, you may need to preview web graphics at 200% magnification in Photoshop to match its size in a web browser.)

The first and last thing the demo does is toggle View > Extras, because that it’s easier to see how the settings are changing the text if the selection highlighting is temporarily hidden.

If exporting to JPEG, lower Quality values will make small text look fuzzier.

[Guest]

Thank you, this is helpful!