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Creating a Photo Blog Header with Photoshop

Creating a header for your blog out of a photo is very easy, and involves only a few steps. It's pretty much a combination of cropping, resizing, and adding text.

The first thing you need to do is find a suitable photo. You must be aware of copyright law when choosing your photo. You own the copyright to any photo that you have personally taken, however, if the photo that you have taken includes people, you may need to get a model release to publish the photo online. The same goes for photos that have products or items with logos displayed. Using someone else's logo can get you in trouble.

If you are looking online for photos, you can't just go to Google images and pick one off the internet. Most of those images are copyright protected, and think about it this way...you most likely wouldn't want others taking your photos and using them, so don't do it to someone else. To be on the safe side, you need to look for public domain photos. There are several resources for public domain images/photos, and here is one that has over 5000 public domain images http://www.public-domain-photos.com/

Cropping Your Photo

Since Photoshop has the awesome ability to crop and resize an image in one step, this won't take long. Most photos downloaded directly from your digital camera are too large to use as they are on the web. So, you will need to know what width you need your photo header. This is going to depend on the width of your blog layout, most of which are set at 800 pixels wide or smaller. Some blogs will automatically resize your header when you upload it, so that it will fit in the space allowed. As for height, that is going to be a personal preference, although I recommend going absolutely no taller than 300 pixels. So, for the example in this tutorial, I'm going to create a photo blog header of 750 pixels wide by 300 pixels tall.

So, after you find the perfect photo, open it up in Photoshop, and follow the instructions for cropping to a specific size and use 750 px in the width box and 300 px in the height box. If your photo is large enough, you can be picky about what part of the photo you want to be in the header. Once you have it where you want it, click the checkmark that is at the top.

Once you've cropped it, if you don't like it, at the top click Edit-->Step Backward, and try it again. Next we will need to add text, and you can follow the tutorial for adding text to images for that. When dealing with a blog header, you may want a fun/unique/funky font, and there are so many places for fonts online. My favorite commercial font sites are www.myfonts.com and www.fontbros.com, both of which have a fantastic selection. Free font sites can be a little tricky, because there are some out there that have those really annoying popups, and you really have to be careful about what you are downloading to your computer. Two free font sites that I've used in the past are http://www.dafont.com/ and http://www.abstractfonts.com/. Just keep in mind when you're choosing a font that you want people to be able to read it. There are many fonts out there that are really cool, but when added to a photo, can be hard to read.

Choosing your text color is important too. If your photo has a dark section, add light colored text there or vice versa. If your photo is widely varied like my example photo, you may want to consider other options like adding a drop shadow to your text, as in the example above. Think about the placement of your text as well. Your text does not have to be centered directly in the middle of your header.

If your text is still hard to read, you may want to consider adding a translucent shape below your text. You will need to use the shape tool, and you can activate that by hitting the U key on your keyboard. Set your foreground color to white, and draw a rectangle below your text. Then in your Layers window, be sure that the shape layer that you just drew is below the text layer. Then adjust the opacity of the shape layer, so that while your photo shows through, the text is more legible.