Google Plus Cover image

[David_ODonnell]

Does anyone have any tips on getting a super crisp cover image uplaoded to G+?

I have a clear image, full dimensions of 2120 x 1192, but once I've uploaded it, G+ appears to compress it and it loses sharpness / quality. I have turned auto-optimise off, and and tried both JPEG and PNG files - PNG seems to work better, but still not quite there.

Example: https://plus.google.com/116325067504054061939 (scroll up to see blurry text)

Thx!

[RickyShockley]

I would maybe check to see if the cover photo was designed with high image resolution? For example, GIMP defaults to a resolution of 72 pixels, but I find that changing that number to 300 produces higher quality on large image files.

Also, check out this article http://ideasandpixels.com/the-new-google-cover-image-size-dimentions

Not sure on this one..hope you find an answer!

[TheHouse]

The answer may lie in the monitor size/resolution that you're currently viewing in.  Cover photos dynamically resize proportionately using 16×9 ratio to fit your screen resolution.  Is your monitor a diff ratio?

I've checked your profile image on my laptop (1600x900) and it actually looks fine on my end.  The resized image that Google serves up on my end: sumo-gplus-banner.png is 1,582px × 892px.  Still it looks very sharp on my laptop.
https://lh6.googleusercontent.com/-1qP29G-HZ2Y/UgMLVkxofxI/AAAAAAAAAF4/-cd0vJVswKs/s1582-fcrop64=1,004d0000ffb1ffff/sumo-gplus-banner.png

Hope that helps.

Milosz

[David_ODonnell]

Asked the designer about the image res, his reply was that everything they did for the web was at 72px so that shouldn't be the issue. However, if you (or anyone) has any evidence to the contraryt, I'd be happy to take it to him.

Re the article, it suggested creating the image at half the dimensions, which I assume would only compound the compression issue.

Thanks for responding!

[David_ODonnell]

Thanks for your reply, the issue is our in-house designers have very keen eyes and don't settle for anything less than perfect, so even a little bit of blurriness of the text in the image is an issue. Highest my work screen res goes up to in 1200x800 but the designers are working on high-end macs.