How to Create the Perfect Pin for Food Bloggers

How to create the perfect pin for food bloggers! I’m sharing an easy-to-follow guide for how you can create eye-catching recipe pins for Pinterest.

If you’re ready to use Photoshop to create the perfect pin for your food blog, I’m here to help!

I’ve been asked quite a bit from fellow food blogging peeps how I create my “pins”, the images used for saving recipes on Pinterest. Creating a pin for recipes on my blog is actually one of my favorite parts of the blogging process… Playing with fonts, text placement, color, photo selection. If I am being honest, I often find myself spending a little too much time getting caught up in designing them.

But if you have no idea where to start on how to achieve an amazing pin, starting the process can be a bit overwhelming. I’ll be breaking down my process on how to create the perfect pin for food bloggers, using Photoshop.

Why Photoshop? Because you have much more control over the photos used within the pin image. Often times if you use the exact same image uploaded into your blog post, that same image can look dull when used in a pin, especially on the mobile app. In Photoshop you can brighten up the photo, highlight certain areas of the food, sharpen the image, etc. which will translate to a brighter photo/pin and capture your reader’s attention while they’re scrolling through Pinterest.

So I am showing you my process on how I create my pins. This is what works for me. Test and play around with it to find your process, fonts, colors, etc. My background is in Illustrator, so for the Photoshop experts out there, I am sure I could be doing things backwards, sideways, etc. My hopes for this post is to reach those that need somewhere to start, and make the process of creating pins easy and fun!

Note: you will need a basic understanding of Photoshop in order to follow along in this post. We are also talking about developing pins specifically for food blogs, however some of the same principles will apply for other blog niches.

So let’s get to work!

Make your canvas

Create a new file and select your pixel size, 736  x 2061 (ideal minimum width and max height for mobile viewing. You can make the canvas longer if you’d like, but it will get cut off when on Pinterest mobile).

Make center rectangle

In the center of the pin image, create rectangle. This is where your recipe title will go. You can add a border by selecting a color from your image, use a background color, etc.

Select & place photos

I typically will select a close-up image of the recipe for the top image, and an alternate view of the recipe for bottom image. Of course these are not set rules. Sometimes the opposite placement works. Or sometimes even two different close up angles will work. Use your best judgement on what will work for your individual recipe.

Make sure the photos you copy over are at least 736 pixels wide (to match the size of your canvas). I like to bring over a little bigger, say 740-800 pixels wide, and then scale down or zoom in as necessary.

Add recipe title

Add the title of your recipe post into the center rectangle. I like to add a new layer for each section of the title so you have more control over manipulating the fonts, color and size of the text. You can also make each word the same text/color/size. Play around with it and see what you think looks best for your style.

How to Select Font Colors

Highlight the text you want to change the color of, and click on the colored square box (circled in red up top). This will open up the box you see showing the shades of blue “Color Picker (Text Color)”. Use the eyedropper to hover over the image and select a color in the image you’d like to use for the text color. Click around the image until you find a shade that you like. You can do this for each set of words for the title to compliment the pictures. Of course you can also stick with just one color for each part of the title. Again, play around to develop your style and have fun with it!

Save your Pin

All that’s left to do is save your pin as a JPEG, or you can also save as PNG. Make sure the quality is high enough and you’re saving as RGB (which your file should already be in RGB color mode from creating the canvas).

Once you’ve created your pin, you can either upload the image into your post OR you can upload it right into Pinterest. Personally, I’ve been going the route of uploading directly to Pinterest to save some space on my website and page load time. But that’s personal preference. Do what works for you!

So do you feel ready to create the perfect pin for your food blog now?

Food blogger friends that aren’t using Photshop to create pins yet, was that helpful? I’d love to hear from you!

Oh, and if you’re looking for the granola recipe, here you go 🙂

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