Profile Picture Help!!

I'm not exactly sure if this is the proper place to bring up this question due to the fact I can't really find a Photography section but here I go. I've been in CS4 editing my Profile Pic for a while now and I'm not exactly sure what the Image size should be. It seems that every Pic I upload to SL and put it as the profile pic comes off as to distant or squished. What do you guys do to make it look just right?

Good thread here:
/327/f0/299409/1.html

My method (a bit different):

open your original picture

create a new document 341 X 256

drag original picture into this document, resize as needed.

save as photoshop document.

Make a copy of the document and close the original.

in the copy I flatten, resize to 256X256.

save as 24bit targa.

upload into SL.

Ok Thank you guys! I'll go try this now.

Same as Lindal's, since 341/256 = 4/3. No need to flatten, though.

Any of the standard desktop sizes will work, too -- 320x200, 640x480, 800x600, 1024x768.

P2

Back in the Olden Dayes of Yore any old snapshot would suffice; times change, though, and lots of people have widescreen monitors. Course you can take any size snap.

I thought the profile pic size was 178×134... am I wrong about this?

What would widescreen monitors have to do with anything? AFAICT, the profile picture size hasn't changed.

For the people search it scales up and down with the "UI size" setting in preferences, and it's scaled to 256x192 in the web search, and now there are all those silly profile picture wall things in world, so 256x192 or 512x384 end up working well.

The point is, it doesn't make any difference whether you choose 256x192 or 512x384 or 1024x768 or .... . What you need is a photo that is cropped with a 4:3 ratio. Resize it to a square image with one of the standard "powers of 2" set of dimensions (128x128, 256x256, 512x512) and upload it. When SL uses your square image in the profile box space, it will stretch it appropriately to make it appear as it did before you resized.

Oh, but that does matter, profile textures screw with performance just like the in-world ones do. A 1024x1024 texture is way too large, don't upload them larger than you need to get the idea across.

I've said it before, and I'll say it again. Whoever designed the UI pics windows should be shot. And if they already have been, well someone should dig them up and shoot them again, just to emphasize the point.

Quite obviously, whoever it was knew nothing about nothing with regard to 3D. My guess is it was a Web designer, or a generic 2D app UI designer. It's absolutely ludicrous to put non-power-of-two sized picture panes into a system that can only import images which ARE sized in powers of two. I'm usually pretty forgiving of Linden goofs, but come on; how on Earth could this one possibly have slipped by? There's simply no excuse for it. Words like "sloppy" or "asleep at the wheel" don't even begin to describe it.



In any case, here's how I deal with it:

1. Create your image at a multiple if the target size. For example, if your target is 346x241, make your image, say, twice that in each dimension, 692x482. This way, when you resize to powers of two, you'll be downsizing the whole time, never upsizing, which will help ensure maximum visual quality.

2. Downsize the image to powers of two. You want to get the size as close as possible to the target window size, without making it smaller than the target in either dimension. 512x256 is ideal for the above example. (Note, the proportions of the image will seem all out of whack at this point. Don't worry about it. The next step will fix it.)

3. Upload the image, and apply it. It will downsize disproportionately to fit the window, and the proportions will now appear to be correct. You're done.

Tip: If you want the image to load faster, you can go with a smaller size. Visual quality will suffer, though.

Yes, of course. But at the step I was describing, 1024 x 768 is a perfectly good size because you're going to end up resizing it to whatever dimensions you need for upload -- presumably 512x512. I agree that you'd NEVER want to upload a pic that's 1024x1024 for use in a profile, but it's perfectly fine to start with a huge image in Photoshop.

The proportions are 4:3.

Widescreen proportions are 16:9 or 5:4. NTSC is an almost square 4:3. Niether of which have anything to do with aspect ratio limits in SL. http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Limits

I was talking about non-widescreens when I said 4:3 (obviously).

That doesn't make that fact any more relevant, or my point any less valid. Profile pictures aren't bound to monitor aspects.

[/url]
Not that it's really relevant to the topic of the thread, but just for accuracy's sake, let me offer a couple of corrections here.

First, and rather obviously, 5:4 is NOT wide. It's actually narrower (closer to square) than 4:3. A 4:3 rectangle is fully one third wider than it is tall, while a 5:4 rectangle is just one quarter wider than tall. A third is bigger than a quarter. 4:3 is wider than 5:4.

5:4, is actually the narrowest of all the non-widescreen standards for computer screens, and only became very popular when inexpensive LCD panels, with a resolution of 1280x1024, hit the market about a decade or so ago. It allowed for some extra height over the pre-existing 4:3 1280x960 standard. If memory serves, "taller" was marketed at the time as "better for document reading", just as "wider" is now marketed as "better for video".

The slightly wider, but still not "widescreen" ratio of 4:3 includes the standard resolutions of 2048x1536, 1600x1200, 1400x1050, 1280x960, 1024x768, 800x600, and 640x480, and dates all the way back to the mid 1980's.


Second, while 16:9 is typical for widescreen HDTV's (1920x1080 and 1280x720), it's not what you're ever likely to find in computer monitors. All the common widescreen monitor resolutions in use today are 16:10 (2560x1600, 1920x1200, 1680x1050, 1280x800), not 16:9.

Should you do the same for a Insignia?