Going through some of the Social Network sites such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Plaxo, etc, I noticed that the profile images had quite a lot of size variety. Not that there is much time to my weekly schedule to delve into this sort of thing. I did figure if I could find a good answer to it I would at least have something to write about, and one can never make a research effort like that without adding a bunch of cool links to my toolbar. Before I get too far ahead of myself I do believe that you need to start with a great image of yourself. Granted the obvious path would be to come and see me:). But my purpose isn’t really to plug my services, but to give you some pointers. One doesn’t need a super professional camera, just one that the ability to take at least a 1.5mg file. Set the camera at low ISO, say 100 or 200. The images will be crisper. Now if you can’t get someone to take the image of you, then make sure that you have access to a tripod and a timer on the camera. The best body position for your profile image would be a “3/4” style – that is head, shoulders, and upper torso to the belly button area. You don’t need any special type of lighting other than window light. That being said, make sure that the window is on the shadow side of your house – you don’t want to be blinded by sun light. Shoot away! Take a couple dozen. Smile for some, pleasant for others, and maybe some serious ones. Try to edit down to 2-3.
Make sure you like the image that you are going to use – one of the most important additions that you can add to any of your Social Media sites is the consistency of your image. You should use one or maybe two of the images on all your sites. You can add some variety to your images with post editing software such as Photoshop and there are enough Photoshop tutorials on YouTube to keep you busy for a couple weeks. Once you have your image, there are countless post editing actions that are available on the internet. Make sure that you start with a 72dpi image. If you have done nothing except edit and use Photoshop actions then the image size will probably be a 300dpi image, which is too large for most sites. Once you have your image worked up, the next item on your short list is to make sure that your image fits the dimensions required by that particular site. Here is a short list of dimension for the popular sites:
- Facebook – 50X50 (pixels)
- Twitter – 73X73
- Plaxo – 114X161 (this varied)
- LinkedIn – 80X80
- StumbleUpon 64X64
- Digg – 120X120
When in doubt you can can do is to navigate to someone’s profile page, right-click on the avatar, and choose “View Image Info,” which will display details about that image, including the dimensions of it.
You can also add a little fun to your avatar by trying some of these sites. They are fun and very easy to use:
photofunia
MadMen
Even your own Simpson’s Avatar
Below are some examples of images I set up for posting styles.
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- Sepia Cyanotype Black & White Cross Platform Color
- Here are some avatars that I created from Photofunia.
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Filed under: Weddings | Tagged: avatars, Photoshop, Profile Picture, Social Media | Leave a comment »