SCarlin Photography

How to put your face on Facebook

I recently saw an inspirational display on Flickr that got me thinking about what could be done with the Facebook album layout. Norby on Flickr created a collage of sorts that is simply amazing.

With his efforts in mind I decided it wouldn’t be too difficult to do the same thing with Facebook.

So here is my step by step how to guide to putting your face on Facebook. I’m using a Vista laptop for this exercise, so these instuctions are limited to Windows based commands and shortcuts.  I’m certain that my Apple using friends and family will have no problem translating this to Applespeak for their own purposes.

I chose to use Photoshop, but you could use any image editing program that allows layers, such as GIMP (a free, open source program). You are welcome to use my PSD Template file and skip the first 7 steps where I explain how to create the PSD Template file if you’d like.

1. You will need to select an existing album within Facebook that is full of photos and do a screen capture of the page.  You can use a screen capture utility or you can do it the old fashioned way and just press ALT+Prtsc (some keyboards actually say “Print Screen”) on your keyboard.
2. Now open Photoshop and create a new document. By default, the size of the document should be the same as the screen capture that you just created.
3. Press CTRL+V to paste your screenshot into your new document.
4. Select the Crop Tool and crop your image to the edges of the album.
5. Select the Rectangular Marquee Tool and carefully select the inside area of one of your images. I found it easiest to zoom in before trying to do this.
6. Once you have selected the rectagular area of one of your images you can simply press the DEL key on your keyboard to clear that space.  Repeat this will all of the images.
7. Now that you have a patchwork grid to use as a template you are on to the easy part – choosing your image.
8. Place the image that you want to use as a layer below your grid layer and resize and rotate until it looks best to you.
9. Once your image is properly placed you now select the Slice Tool.
10. Use the Slice Tool to carefully select the inside area of each rectangle – I found that this was easiest when I zoomed in very close. If you need to adjust some of your slices you can use the Slice Select Tool to quickly resize the slices.
11. Once all of your images have been Sliced you are on to the final step in the process – Save for Web (Alt+Shift+Ctrl+S).
12. In the Save for Web dialog make sure that the Quality setting is set to 100 and that you are saving as JPG format.
13. Click the Save button and select an appropriate folder for your files.
14. Make sure that the “Save as Type” drop down shows “HTML and Images”.  Although you won’t need the HTML file in the long run, it will make it easier to verify that you properly sliced your image.
15. Press the Save button
16. Browse to the folder that you selected in step 12 and open the HTML file with your favorite browser. Verify that everything appears as expected.
17. Go to your Facebook account and upload all of the rectangular images into a new album. Make sure that you don’t upload any of the space and background images.  I chose to copy all of the cut out images into a new folder to reduce the possibility of making a mistake with this.
18. Once all of the images have been uploaded you may need to organize them into the proper order, but once that is done you will have your face on Facebook.

I hope you find this tutorial useful and if you create your own Facebook face please come back and post a link to it here.

Concept, Information, Portrait