Profile Pic

I set my profile pic image to 178 x 134 and saved it as a png, uploaded it, put it in my profile and it looks all fuzzy. I've included a screen shot below. Any idea why it's so fuzzy?

http://i42.tinypic.com/zofdch.png

Hi Max and welcome to the forums.

I am guessing the image is too small. I usually upload images resized to 512 pixels minimum. Of course I could be wrong but someone who has a more concise answer will be along soon.

Hi, Max.

I'm afraid all profile pics have a bit of fuzziness to them, no matter what format they're saved in. I suggest you zoom in much closer to your face and possibly stand near a light source (rez a prim and set 'light source' in the features tab) to get a really clear shot.

cant' reply

I wrote a detailed response, but keep getting 403 Forbidden when I try to post it

1. Take pic at full screen resolution
2. Save to hard drive
3. Crop a 4:3 area and paste it into a new image
4. Resize the image to be 512 x 512 or other dimensions which are a power of 2
5. Upload to SL
6. Drag the texture into your profile pic area and save profile

note that other picture areas in the profile require other aspect ratios...square for the Picks, widescreen 16:9 for the First Life pic, if I recall.

The different format dimensions are:

Profile Pic: 168 x 126 (Resize to 512x384 or 256x192 for upload)
My Picks: 290 x 164 (Resize to 512x292 for upload)
1st Life Pic: 135x135 (Resize to 256x256 or 128x128 for upload.)

You can blame your woes on poorly thought out GUI design. SL, like most 3D platforms, requires that textures be measurable in powers of two, but the various picture fields, measure arbitrarily, not like textures but like Web graphics. It seems fairly obvious that whoever they hired to do those aspects of the GUI was a Web designer, not anyone who knew anything about 3D. No consideration was given whatsoever for what size images SL can and can't use. It's one of LL's greatest blunders (and they've had some doozies), completely inexcusable.

The best thing to do to keep the picture from blurring is to create your source image at an aspect ratio that matches your target size, but at a larger scale, and then downsize it to powers of two, keeping it still larger than the destination frame. For example, if 178x134 is your target, start out with, say, 534x402 (3 times as large, in both dimensions). Then downsize to 512x256 or 256x256 before you upload to SL. When you put the image in the picture field, it will get downsized even further to 178x134. Since you're downsizing the whole time, instead of upsizing, the image won't blur.

I've been using 800x600 and it looks as good as anything. Just keep the 4:3 ratio, or your picture will be screwed up when it's stretched or squished in the profile window. (Like what happened to the Snapzilla pics in my signature.)

Does SL compress uploads into JPEG2000 format? I'd think that's where the mushiness comes from.