Wattpad Book Covers - Understanding the Details

Working With Graphic Imagery

© 2014 Mark W Ballard

Graphic Image Editors

You can edit photographs and raster images with graphics editing software like Gimp (free from www.gimp.org), Photoshop (www.adobe.com) and lots of other programs. 

Refer to the documentation for your graphics editing software for the particulars on how to operate it. We’ll describe the generic features common to most editors to give you an understanding of the basics.

IMPORTANT: Wattpad doesn’t care what software you use to create and edit your book cover images, as long as the final file is delivered at 512x800 resolution in either JPG or GIF file format.

Graphic Editing Features

Crop

The "Crop" feature is one way to cut out an image at exactly the 512x800 Width and Height Wattpad wants. 

Cropping is like taking a pair of scissors and cutting out a rectangle from a large page. The Crop command on most editing software will allow you to set the size of the cropping window to 512x800, then drag the crop box around and place it to capture just the area you’d like to display.

Keep in mind, the final cropped image must include all of the info you wanted to show on your book cover - it will only show what is inside the 512x800 pixel cropped rectangle.

Scale

Scaling can shrink the width and height of big pictures down or it can make small pictures larger.  This makes the size of the image that displays on the screen smaller or larger.  Keep in mind, Scaling increments or decrements the number of pixels in an image.

Scaling Down

You can take a large image and scale it down to shrink the width and height by a common scale factor. For example, if your source image is 1024 Wide x 1600 High, that’s too big for Wattpad.  To determine the Scale factor to scale it down to 512x800:

Calculate the scale factor by dividing the Desired Width by the Current Width:

     Scale Factor (X) = Desired Width / Current Width
     X = 512 / 1024
     X = 0.5

Now, use a scale factor of 0.5 to scale down the original image. 

Check that the height of the scaled image is not greater than 800.  If so, the resulting image is ready for Wattpad.  If not, undo the Scale operation and repeat the same procedure with your original file, but using the 'Desired Height' and the 'Current Height' instead of the Width.

Keep in mind that when you scale an image down, you are squeezing the entire picture to fit into a smaller area which contains a smaller number of pixels. That means, the scaled down image will lose some detail. Experiment and make sure it looks okay.

Scaling UP

It's generally a bad idea to scale an image UP, because when you scale an image up to a larger size, it may look bad (they call it, 'pixelated').  Remember, scaling up increases the original number of pixels in the image, effectively just making each pixel bigger without adding more detail.  In case you need to do it, here’s the process:

You can make an image’s Width and Height larger by scaling it up. For example, if the original image is 256x400, it’s too small for Wattpad.  To calculate the Scale factor to scale it up to 512x800:

Calculate the scale factor by dividing the Current Width by the Desired Width:

     Scale Factor (X) = Current Width / Desired Width
     X = 1024 / 512
     X = 2

Now, use a scale factor of 2 to scale up the original image. 

Check that the height of the scaled image is not greater than 800.  If so, the resulting image is ready for Wattpad.  If not, undo the Scale operation and repeat the same procedure with your original file, but using the 'Current Height' and the 'Desired Height' instead of the Width.

* Extra Credit: Ratio - The relationship between an image’s Width and Height is referred to as a “Ratio”. The ratio for a Wattpad book cover is:

     512 : 800
     1 : 1.5625
or roughly  2 : 3

Think of it in terms like this… 

     1 is to 512 as ? is to 800

Or to put it another way, if you have an image that is 1 inch wide, it will be 1.5624 (roughly 1-1/2) inches high.

The Image’s Ratio is calculated by dividing the image’s larger side dimension by its smaller side dimension:

     Ratio (X) = Image Big Side / Image Small Side
     X = 800 / 512
     X = 1.5625

If you have a large image, you can calculate the ratio and if it comes out to 2:3, you can scale it down for direct import into Wattpad's Book Cover app with very little loss.

If this has been helpful, maybe you can help me become the next global Wattpad star... (hey - it could happen!!   ;o)