How to Color, Sharpen, and Save Your Images for Web with Photoshop

On this video tutorial Aaron Nace from Phlearn looks at an important topic – how to best prepare your image for the web using Adobe Photoshop.

O.K., let’s be honest now, even if you are a pro photographer there is a very good chance that most of your images are going to be published online. This is just the way things are these days. And even if you do print – you will want some smaller res versions to appear on your personal site/facebook etc. But if they don’t look their best – what is the point?

Many photographers (including otherwise talented and professional ones) do not appreciate the fact that you need to know how to best save an image for the web (and more specifically – for a certain size of web display – and no – larger isn’t always better in this case).

Nace starts with some color correction using a layer mask and a curve adjustment layer to add some brightness. Now comes the important part – let’s say that you have a large image (maybe 24MP) if you sharpen it and than reduce the size in order to save for web – you will not get the same sharpening as you would if you first reduce it to the size that you want and than apply the correct amount of sharpening! (this is a super important point to remember). Another important point – always save the full size edit (as PSD) so that you will be able to later resize and sharpen the image again and again for any size that you might need in the future (every site has a specific preferred size (and they change from time to time – see this article).

There are some other important tips like clicking the save for web>convert to SRGB. You can also click on preview which will open your image in a browser which will let you check the sharpening and colors before you actually save.

You can find many more Photoshop video tutorials on LensVid’s Photoshop section (and you can find a lot more Phlearn videos on our special Phlearn subsection).

Iddo Genuth
Iddo Genuth is the founder and chief editor of LensVid.com. He has been a technology reporter working for international publications since the late 1990's and covering photography since 2009. Iddo is also a co-founder of a production company specializing in commercial food and product visual content.

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