Avatars

[James3167]

Greetings,

I have noticed that many forum members have large high quality avatars, and I would like to ask those members what program are they using for their avatars; moreover, I cannot find a way to keep a good quality image that is 150 x 150 px and 32 KiB at the same time, so what's your secret? Were you grandfathered into a larger avatar, using a special program to scale and reduce the size of the file, or just found a file small enough to use as your avatar?

Thank you!

[napsii]

Well, there's a number of ways to do it. My personal preference is to crop a part of an image and rescale it to the proper dimensions/file size. My current avatar (and all of my past avatars here) is as such, but there's a bunch of ways to do it. There are no doubt plenty of images floating around the internet already scaled and intended to be used as avatars.

[zeldafreak1]

I use google images to find a picture that's close to the size limit and then just use MSPaint to edit it. (Im too poor for Photoshop and I don't trust the numerous torrents out there)

[Zeus Kabob]

Greetings,

I have noticed that many forum members have large high quality avatars, and I would like to ask those members what program are they using for their avatars; moreover, I cannot find a way to keep a good quality image that is 150 x 150 px and 32 KiB at the same time, so what's your secret? Were you grandfathered into a larger avatar, using a special program to scale and reduce the size of the file, or just found a file small enough to use as your avatar?

Thank you!

Important considerations: image compression scheme and compression level. If you're using file types like .BMP, you'll find yourself using much, MUCH more space than is necessary. I only really use 2 image formats; Jpeg and PNG.

Jpeg is used for smaller images that don't have to be picture perfect. Its algorithm works very well at compression levels of about 80% - 90%, and leaves the picture looking very similar to an uncompressed image.

PNG is used for its portability (hence the name Portable Network Graphic), which means that it can be used on any system (Win, Mac, Linux). Jpeg is usually supported on all of those, but image formats such as GIF and PSD usually don't work too well on all operating systems and programs. The file size is typically much larger, as it uses DEFLATE to compress the file (you'd get similar compression with a .gz compression scheme). It works best with compression levels of about 60-80%, leaving the image photorealistic. As this implies, however, it fills 2-4x the space of a jpeg.

I used Gimp for editing the image, scaling it, and exporting it. Gimp doesn't work so well on my Windows box, though, so I wouldn't recommend learning it. Maybe if they came out with a better port, but I've already learned all the tools, so I'm sticking with it.

My avatar image is a jpeg export of a scaled down version of Mr. D's image (Thanks, D!), and I used the Jpeg quality of 100, resulting in a 31.2 KB file. With a quality of 90 (default), you get an 11.2 KB file.

Edit: In fact, I see that you're using a PNG for your avatar image. If you used a jpeg of the same size, it wouldn't appear any lower quality, as no jpeg artifacts are noticeable at such small size, but it would take up about 1/2 to 1/3rd the space, depending on compression settings. In this case, as you're currently using an 80x82 image, you can easily scale it up to 146x150 at quality level 90, and possibly at quality level 100. Of course, I'd suggest using the highest quality allowed (maybe I'm mean to the server...), but there shouldn't be any noticeable difference between 90 and 100 (or 80, for that matter).

Hope that helps!

[James3167]

To start off, I want to thank all three of you for your advice, they were all helpful.

I had used MS Paint at first to crop the image; remembered that GIMP was something I had jotted down on my "to-download" list a long while ago, but I would still come-up short with a mediocre image. Napsii confirmed and reassured me that the image could, in fact, be scaled down smoothly; afterwards, Zeldafreak1 gave me an alternative to using the image I had (1000 x 1080 [or something close to it] is NOT a good pixel size when you want to use a simple graphics raster program to manually scale the image ). Finally, Zeus Kabob told me what I was doing wrong, I was saving the image in a 0% quality scale on GIMP (I thought the higher the number, the lower the quality, simple but costly mistake). I still appreciate the long post and mini-seminary (in a good connotation as in the college seminary, not the blackmailing vacation seminary some people attend) on using GIMP and the best file format for it's own specific purpose.

Note to Zeus Kabob: Yes, a 10 percent deviation in GIMP PNG quality terms (and as you said, possibly even 20 percent) is nothing of a big deal, my PNG file on a 70 percent quality compression was only .1 KiB bigger than the 60 percent quality compression.

I suggest for this thread to not be locked as other newly registered users (even for those whom have spent a year as one [I am referring to the oxymoron in the words, meant to be taken light-heartedly. This is not a complain.] could also ask avatar-related questions not mentioned in the FAQ already (not that this needs to be) in my opinion.

Regardless, I thank you all, again!

[maximilianos]

otherwise you can google ''image resize'' or something like that, to get to a page that does everything for you (I did this)

(i also made it a bit darker with a picture-managing program, but still...)