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by Bastard Child
avart
Avatar Picture How-To Guide
Rules: There are two hard set rules to abide by:- Your avatar image has to be in JPG format, and has to be smaller than 24kB in size (the server is a little bit picky, so under 20kB would be even better).
- If your image does not meet both these conditions it will be rejected by the server, and fail to upload.
Guidelines: To get the best from an avatar picture the following pointers should be kept in mind.
- Atomic’s forum software will automatically shrink or stretch a picture to fit into a 64x64 pixel space (which doesn’t give you all that much room to work with, I can tell you that!)
- Allowing atomic to auto-size a picture will make it either blurry or blocky, so save the final image at exactly 64x64 pixels to avoid this.
- Try your best to fill the available space - having a tiny image with a lot of blank space around it will be even harder to see at 64x64 pixels.
- Avatar pictures made from very detailed full-sized images can look poor because so much detail has to be squashed together. Have a look around and see what works for other people.
- The background colour used on atomic’s forum is 48 green (Red = 0, Green = 48, Blue = 0). Using 48 green in your avatar will make it blend into the page.
Software: Google, and a half-decent graphics package - we all own Photoshop right !? (MS Paint can *sort of* do the job if you’re too lazy to download something better) (There's even GIMP for those who don't wish to pay, pirate or settle for paint :P - Ed).
Where To Start: You can either draw a picture from scratch, modify something from the internet, or modify an existing picture from your hard drive. We’ll skip the first option, and dive into modifying an existing picture.
Unless you have something lying around already, your best bet for finding some good pictures is ‘Google Image Search’
You can either Google topics that interest you (like celebrity faces, comic book heroes, company logos, pets, etc.) or just try random words* (purple, landscape, car, funny, wallpaper, etc.)
*I recommend you turn “Safe Search Filtering” ON, or you may be in for a surprise ;)
Generally the better the quality of your starting image, the better looking your final avatar will be (as much as can be expected from 64x64 pixels).
Large images can be shrunk down without too much drama, but enlarging very tiny pics will tend to blur them and cause loss of definition (shrinking throws away excess data, enlarging can only use what it has to start with).
You should also be aware of copyrighted images and asking for permission first, but most forum avatar pictures are stolen. This doesn’t make it right to do, and if you get an angry letter from someone it would be wise to do as they say.