Frequently Asked Questions:
How do I create 980 x 250 px images for the header?
Some people get confused when trying to create images that are 980 pixels wide by 250 pixels high for the header area masthead or Flashfader images.
One common thing I hear is that people can’t figure out how to get them sized that way, because whenever they try to set one of the dimensions, it screws up the other dimension.
Basically, you’re not just resizing when you’re trying to make images into these dimensions, you’re cropping. If you try to just resize and leave the box “constrain proportions” checked, you’ll never get it to work, because most photos are a 2:3 ratio, and 980×250 is a different ratio.
So, if you’re trying to make a single image into a header image, I would recommend FIRST just resizing the image so that the width is 980px and let the height be whatever it will be. THEN use the crop tool to crop out a 250px tall section of the image. Here’s what the crop tool looks like in Photoshop:
This will create a very “panoramic” look, and can be quite cool. You get some unique crops when doing this, like below, from Joel Llacar’s website:
Or, if you want to make a collage-type multiple-images-in-one-image look, then resize a bunch of images to 250px tall and let their width be whatever. Then create a new file in Photoshop with the dimensions of 980×250px, and copy those image into it and play around with it in there.
Below is an example of such an image I created in Photoshop. Click on it to view and/or download the full-sized version. You can see that even though it looks like one image, it is actually several images made into one.
Some people get confused when trying to get their Flashfader to look like this and think they can upload a bunch of little images of varying widths, but you can’t. You have to create composite images out of the small images first, like the one shown above, with the exact dimensions of 980px by 250px.
Questions? Instead of emailing for support, leave a comment below so everyone can benefit from any clarification.
I changed the code to allow the masthead image to be 980X500px, however for some reason the image seems to get skewed back to the 250px hight (although the proportions are still 500px).
Anyway to get the masthead image to be higher than the default if you’re just using a static image?
@christian: yeah, you’ll need to go into your header.php file and find the line that looks like this: (about line 94=)
<!–delete next line/chunk if using FlashFader –>
<img src=”<?php bloginfo(’template_directory’) ?>/images/header-masthead.jpg” height=”250″ width=”980″ alt=”<?php bloginfo(’name’) ?> header” />
and then change the height to whatever you want it to be.