The banner format (short and wide) has been around in web sites forever. One of the later iterations is the Facebook cover photo, the photo at the top of your profile page. In this post I’m going to share some hints for how to make better cover photos.
What makes a good cover photo?
A good cover photo looks as if it belongs in that weird short-wide format. The main subject should fit without important bits being chopped off, and it should stand out from the background. Any important details need to be visible and intelligible at the size it will be shown. If you can manage all of that and have a good composition as well, then you have a great cover photo!
Problems you will have to overcome
The main problem is that cameras take photos whose shape is very different from that of a cover photo. With the trend today of taking phone pictures in a portrait orientation, most photos you already have are not suitable. Certainly not if they have been been well-framed at the time of taking the picture. For instance, if you take a nice close-up of a chipmunk eating a peanut, you might leave it as is, or crop a bit closer. Here I’m choosing a closer crop:
Trying to frame this as a cover photo will result in chopping off either the ears or the paws; either will leave the viewer feeling that something is missing, which of course it is.
So in this example, the photographer would have needed to decide that a cover photo was in the cards, and either taken the photo from further away, or zoomed out to include more space to the left and/or the right of the subject. However, this would result in a lot of uninteresting real estate in the photo. A better solution would be to wait for an opportunity to photograph the beast when it and its tail form a naturally horizontal format:
Another potential problem problem is finding a way to help the subject stand out from the background. Colours, contrast, and background blur will need to play a big part in highlighting the main subject, because there’s less opportunity to properly frame the image. Normally, composition can help to promote the main subject, but there isn’t space to finesse this here, especially in the vertical direction. However, the way these images are used, you can get away with placements you’d never use in a regular format.
And lastly, because the image will normally be presented in a relatively small space, the picture can’t rely on tiny details which won’t show up.
How to crop photos
While one can upload an image and then crop it within Facebook, I find it best to edit how an image will look before uploading the photo. And I prefer to crop in a photo editing suite on my computer where there is more control. Of course, you can also do this in an app on your phone, but we all use the tools we’re most comfortable with. Many photo editors have a crop tool that lets you create a frame with the correct proportions, and then move it around the image and make it bigger or smaller, all the while retaining the correct proportions. If you have never done this before, here’s a hint: often the crop tool icon looks like two intersecting “L” shapes (one upside down) representing two corners of the picture being cropped out.
Here are two screenshots showing how cropping works on my phone, in the photo editor. (Android, whatever photo editor someone decided to install.) In the second shot, the tiny “1” shows one of the four places I can drag to change the shape of the crop. If I want to get fancy, I could rotate the crop using “2” (useful for scenes with a flat horizon, like a body of water, to get it straight) and “3” lets me choose one of a small set of standard formats, like 4×6 or 16×9. Nothing similar to the 851×315 I use for Facebook. In this situation, I’d crop so it was still too big in both directions, and do the final positioning in FaceBook, or whatever you’re uploading to. Again, I prefer to do all this with a desktop editor.
Even better would be to compose in the camera for a cover format, but I find I don’t walk around thinking about finding a great cover photo. About the only time I find myself doing that is around Christmas when I know I will need a winter scene that I’ll use as my cover photo. To be honest, I tend not to “see” pictures in this format naturally.
Sometimes we get cover photos by accident
So most of the time, I find covers while I’m editing photos that I’ve already taken. Sometimes there is an obvious horizontal composition. At other times there is too much clutter above and below the point of interest for a more traditional format, like 4″ x 6″, and a short wide format just works. Many times a great cover photo has come from an image that I was going to delete. Because you only need 851 or so pixel-width of interesting subject, an extreme crop can work for a cover, while it would look terrible in a larger format.
So to finish up this post, here’s a gallery of some images which ended up as cover photos, showing how I cropped them. In some you can see where, as well as the crop, I changed the angle as well.
