Avatar Picture in forum

Could anyone tell me how they achieve a nice picture of their avies face when sizing it to 50 x 50 to put in their profile here on the forum?

I have seen some that are sooo nice... I want one and cant do it with out looking all "mushed"

Thanks for any advice

Tiana, I did a PrtScrn while inworld, then pasted that to my editor (The Gimp.) I then cut out my face with a rectangle select set to 50x50 (you can set the size) then copied and pasted it to a new layer. Saved it as a JPG and voila! Or you can cut out your face then resize it in Gimp with "best quality" resizing (as opposed to fastest.)

1. Photoshop or it's equivalent.

2. Take a good facial shot: camera control onto yourself (for close close-up, dun forget control-0). Make sure your face is well lit. Save the image to your drive, and make it fairly large. You'll get more detail dat way, even though it's gonna be teensy.

3. Crop the image into a square shape. Make a square selection around the area you want (in Photoshop, use the Rectangular Marquee tool, and hold down the "shift" key while dragging to get a perfect square). In many ways, less is more, too, because of the size of the image. Crop it close.

4. Resize the image to 50 x 50 pixels. In photoshop, do this under Image > Image Size.

Optional: you may wish to adjust the saturation of your image, to bring up the color a bit. Do this under Image > Adjustments > Hue/Saturation. You might also find your image to be a bit "soft focus." Try filders > Sharpen > Sharpen and see if it looks a little better to you.

Mari

I think you need to save it as a *.gif as well in order for it to not surpass max image size.

#1 - It's hard to make them look nice. At least for me!

#2 - What OS are you using, and what graphics programs do you already have?

For those on a Mac, I highly recommend a free program called ImageWell:
http://xtralean.com/IWOverview.html

I haven't tried the new version seen on that web page, but my older version is very fast and perfect for cropping and resizing. The resizing in particular is great... the smoothing is beautiful, way better than my Photoshop Elements does.

It's also nice that you can try one thing, check the results (I recommend the Xee viewer... fast fast fast!), adjust the crop and scaling as desired and export again... all in seconds!

You can resize photos in Paint too But you need to "stretch" it smaller till its almost 50 pixels first.

The just change the size to 50x50 and your good.

You can set JPG quality/file size to your desired level in most graphics programs. At least in all my graphics programs, GIFs are limited to 256 colors, so tend to dither the colors in most av images.

Oh you guys are the best

I use PSP9.. I know my way around it, I am just struggling to get to 50 x 50 without looking demented! eeek!

Thank you all for the tips, I am going to go try them out

Yeah but for some reason my jpeg, set to lowest file size, was too big for the forums. I had to make it a gif.

Wow, that's weird. The max file size is 19.5KB, and mine is less than 5KB.

Even weirder: Mine is a PNG... which normally means the file size is LARGER than a JPEG. When I save it as a highest-quality JPEG, it's under 4KB. And a totally uncompressed TIFF file is only 16KB.

Frankly, I can't get any normal format to go OVER the file size limit!

I went for a much simpler solution..typed 'icons download' into Google..picked the first site listed and downloaded the first appropriate graphic.

Considering the way I'm feeling thanks to the VAT inundation..I thought this was about right.

Perre