Hey ladies, I've got a little tutorial for you on saving your layouts. A lot of you may already be doing this so if you are you can ignore my ramblings. For a long time I wasn't saving my layouts properly and learning this trick has made a huge difference in the look of my layouts. I made a little before and after to show you what I mean.

Before (flattening the image and saving)



After (running an upsharp mask before saving)



You can see a big difference in the clarity and color of the second layout.

Here are the steps I take to save my layouts. (I use PSE7, this should apply to most versions of PSE, if you have a different program and would like a tutorial, leave a comment on this post)

When I'm finished with my layout, the first thing I do is go to the layers pallet at the right of my screen and merge all the layers. Make sure to change the background to a layer or the process won't work correctly.

Go up to the "Layers" drop down and scroll all the way to the bottom and flatten the image. I realize that you don't have to merge layers before you flatten the image but it seems to help with the clarity of your page if you do.

Click the "Image" drop down menu at the top of your screen and scroll down to "re-size" and then select "Image size". Starting at the bottom change your resolution to 72 and Width/Height to 600x600. Make sure the boxes of scale styles, constrain proprotions and Resample Image:biopic are checked.

Find the "Enhance" drop down menu and select "Unsharp Mask". This section is a little about preference but the settings I use are: Amount 70%, Radius 1.0 Pixel, Threshold 4 levels.

Now you are ready to save. Click on the "File" drop down menu and select "Save for Web". Make sure the file is set to JPEG. Click the arrow beside the "Preset" drop down menu and choose "Optimize to file size" and type 150 for desired file size. When you are done click "ok" at the top right of the page and it will allow you to choose where you want to save the file.

Note that these instructions are for how to save your layouts for the best web viewing. You would not be able to print in this size. If you have any questions leave me a comment on this post.

Kimberly

Wow, Kimberly. Thanks! I'll have to try this next time and see if I can see a difference.

Ok, so when I do this, the file size is over 150K, which is the max file size for a lot of galleries. Do you run into this problem when posting in the various galleries?

After you run the unsharp Mask cick on the "File" drop down menu and select "Save for Web". Make sure the file is set to JPEG. Click the arrow beside the "Preset" drop down menu and choose "Optimize to file size" and type 150 for desired file size. When you are done click "ok" at the top right of the page and it will allow you to choose where you want to save the file.

If that doesn't fix it let me know.

Sorry. You probably think I cannot follow instructions....thank you for your patience. I could not find optimize to file size for the life of me, but I just now found it.

One other question. Biopic is not a choice for me on image>resize>image size> My choices are "Nearest Neighbor", "Bilinear", "Bicubic", "Bicubic Smoother" or "Bicubic Sharper." Do you know which of these is my best choice?

I just tried it out and I used Bicubic Sharper. I can REALLY tell the difference!

Oh awesome Joanna! I think Bicubic sharper should be just fine! I'd love to see a before and after if you have time.

Here is the layout saved the way I would normally do it...


And here it is following your instructions...

Joanna!!! That looks fantastic, I'm so happy it worked for you *clapping*

Aww that is amazing!!