Choose What Sits Over Your Photos

Many designs open with your photos full width and your name set across them. Whether that name can be read depends entirely on the photograph. A dark headshot and a white name work. A bright outdoor shot and a white name disappear into each other. The design cannot know which one you uploaded, but you can see it.

So the overlay between your photo and your name is now your choice.

Where to find it

Open Website, then Adjustments, and click Slideshow overlay. The chooser shows your own first featured photo with each option laid over it:

• None, your photo exactly as you shot it
• four strengths of darkening, for bright photos under light type
• two gradients, for the edge of the photo where the type usually sits
• a vignette, a lightener, and a tint in your own color
• the tiling textures, laid over the photo
• Rain, animated, the same effect as the animated background

It works on 42 designs, which is every design that sets type over one of your photographs. Your choice replaces the design's own shading instead of stacking on top of it, so you never get two layers of darkening turning your photo to mud.

A page for finishing touches

The overlay lives on a page that is new too. The small switches that finish a site used to sit in a narrow column beside the design grid, with labels like "Folio: Retain Proportions" crammed into it. They have their own page now, Adjustments, grouped under real headings, with one sentence under each switch saying what it does. Your logo and favicon, header and footer text, social icons, the extras on your pages and your loading screen are all there.

With the column gone, the design grid next door got room for filters, which the catalog post covers.

How to pick an overlay

Look at your site on a phone, not only on a laptop. A phone crops a wide photo hard, and the part left behind your name is often brighter than you expect. If your name is hard to read there, try a gradient first; it darkens only where the type is and leaves your face alone.

Your headshot galleries and photo categories are unaffected. The overlay applies only to the big opening photos.