Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let me show you how to create a
social media profile picture from a photo in your Mac Photos Library.
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So most social media networks like Facebook, Twitter, and so on they allow you to create a
profile picture. Usually a square photo that you can upload and that's what everybody sees
when you post something or comment on something. Most people usually just upload
any old photo and then use the tools on the social media site
to crop it and adjust it. But you can create a better profile picture using the Mac Photos App.
Make it already to go so you could upload and use it on any social media platform.
So let's launch the Photos App. The first thing you need to do is find a good photo of yourself
to use. A trick to doing that is to use People. So People will show you the people in your photos
library. It will identify everybody by face and if you've been keeping up with maintaining this
then usually you'll find yourself as one of those people. So you can go into that and then
you could see yourself there. Now if you haven't been keeping up with it you may first want to go
all the way to the bottom and then use Confirm Additional Photos so you can get more photos of
yourself into this grouping. Then go back up here, but scroll down to where it says Photos
and Show More. Now click Show More and it will change this into a grid with all of the photos in
the collection. Now you want to go here, where it says Photos, Faces. Photos will show the complete
photo for each one. But if you switch to Faces it will zoom in on the face in the photo. So now you
can look at all of the photos of you and pick one that you think will make a good profile picture.
So I'm going to pick this one right here
and use that. Now if I were to upload this directly it will look just like this. I'll have
to crop it or maybe settle for my face being kind of off-center. So let's work with it in Photos to
make it a better profile picture. I'm going to go over here to Edit and the first thing I want to
do is Crop it. Since most social media networks use square photos and most photos you take are
not going to be square you want to crop to be square. So go to Crop and then on the right here
open up the Aspect Ratios here and select Square. That will select a square cropping.
Now you can click and drag the photo left, right, up, and down. You can adjust the corners here
to change the size to get yourself right in the middle of the square photo. Now you want to make
sure you don't get too close to yourself because a lot of social media networks will crop out
some of the stuff around here and it doesn't make a good photo when you're a little too close.
So you kind of want to stretch the edges as much as you can while still kind of getting yourself
close enough to the center. So after adjusting a little bit I'm going to use this. Just like that.
So now that I'm done cropping I'll go over to Adjust and use some adjustment tools. Now
the first thing you may want to try is just using the automatic adjustments. It's this button right
here. Click that and that might be all you need. It might look good enough at that point. I'm going
to go in and adjust some things directly. Under light here I'm going to open up Options and I'm
going to adjust the shadows because I'm wearing a cap here and it creates a shadow on my forehead.
So I'm going to brighten up the shadows which will help with that somewhat. I also can adjust some
other things. I like to adjust maybe Brightness to make it brighter and Contrast as well. For a
profile photo you might want more contrast than you normally do. You can play with other things
like Brilliance, for instance. Just get the effect that you want. Also, take a look under Color.
Under Options here you've got Saturation. Now if you want to have brighter colors go to the right.
If you want to make it more like black and white go to the left. All the way to the
left is completely black and white. If you're okay with that kind of effect you may want to actually
forget about Color here and go to Black and White and then just use any of these options here or
this line here and it will instantly convert it to black and white and allow you to adjust it.
Next you may want to use the Retouch Tool. So you go in here and click there and then you could
smooth out parts of skin and make your photo look a little bit better. Then I'm going to go
to Filters. Now, most of the time you might just want to stick with the original. No filters. But
try out some of these filters and see what you get and every once in a while you get something
that looks pretty good. Maybe not as a regular photo. Something you want to print
out or show to somebody but as a profile picture it might have a really cool look
that you want to use for that social media platform. So I'm going to use Vivid Warm
right here. You can always adjust the amount of the filter for each one.
Now finally I'm going to go back to Adjust and the very last thing in adjustments
is Vignette. I'm going to use that and it's going to create this circle around me. If you
go to the right it will create a dark circle. To the left it will create a light circle.
A lot of social media profiles already crop things into a circle so using this effect
might help it look better in a circle. But even if it's going to use the whole thing it might
still be nice to have some of this effect. It just depends on your personal preference. So now
Done and now I've got my photo right there. If I ever wanted to compare it to my original
I can go back into Edit and if I click right here that's the original photo
and if I release the mouse or trackpad it shows me the photo with all my adjustments.
Now the next thing I want to do is just export it for use. So you can go to File,
Export and then Export my Photo and export like that. Or you can just drag and drop. So I can
drag and drop right here to the Finder, to a Finder window or to the Desktop and I'll get
the file. I probably want to rename it here from the default name and I can use QuickLook and see
there's the nice profile picture. Now I'm ready to upload that and use that
in various different social media networks and, of course, you can also use it right on your Mac
here. Go to Apple ID and then go to your Apple ID Profile picture, right here. If I were to
drag this in I could actually use that as my profile picture for my Apple ID. Then if you
like you can return to People, right here, go back in and then look at other photos that might make
good profile pictures. Maybe save a collection of them to switch it out from time to time.
Remember editing a photo is nondestructive. It always has the original. So after you carefully
created your profile picture you can go back into the photo here, go to Edit and then click Revert
To Original and it will go right back to your original photo. That never goes away. So you can
create a profile picture from a photo you have in your Library without worrying about permanently
changing the photo. You can just revert to it once you're done and have created your profile picture.
Nope you found this useful. Thanks for watching.