Crested Butte Mountain From Gunsight Pass RoadCrested Butte Mountain viewed from Gunsight Pass Road and framed in golden aspen trees.

Social media like Facebook can be a great and free marketing tool for our art. Lots of photographers post images every day. I try and do the same but definitely fall short of the every-day post. 

Making our images look fabulous on social media takes a little extra time but is worth the effort.

Most of us try and use large color spaces like Adobe RGB or Pro Photo RGB to edit our images. These spaces are great for prepping photos for printing but not so great for internet viewing. Internet images must be converted to sRGB for display on the web. If you don't do it, Facebook will. Guess who will do a better job! That's right...you. 

Size also matters. I usually shrink my Facebook files to 2048 dpi on the longest side. This creates a great looking photo on Facebook. I ALWAYS add a watermark logo before posting too. Smaller than 1024 dpi and you'll run into pixelation problems. Larger files are a waste of time since Facebook will reduce them anyway.

Here's how my workflow goes:

1. Work my magic on the image using layers and a large color space like Pro Photo.

2. Save my work as a PSD or TIF file.

3. Shrink the file to 2048 dpi on the long dimension. Flatten the image.

4. Convert the color space to sRGB.

5. Add a watermark in the lower right or left corner.

6. Save as a .jpg file at level 10 in a new (Facebook Photos) folder.

7. Now feel free to post this image to Facebook, Instagram, or whatever social media platform may show up tomorrow.

Enjoy.

A Ghost of SummerFresh, early snow leaves an imprint of a bicycle on a brick sidewalk covered with fallen aspen leaves.