Avatars

[Joash Boyton]

I have had a problem recently with my avatar, I have tried many avatars,a nd they all come up wonky looking. All these avatars I have used on other forums powered by V-bulletin. Mr. Hart(John Hart) and I have tried to sort it out by email, but to no avail, he said to create a thread here, which I think I'm doing now....

I have tried uploading over 30 different pictures. I have tried uploading them from the web, and from my computer. I have tried viewing them from 4 different browsers.--Mozilla, Opera 9.02, IE7, and Safari. All these browsers are of the latest version out.

If anyone has any ideas, I would be glad to hear. If this has been addressed before, let me know.

Thanks,

Joash

[Art Mulder]

Just stay away from Andy, or you'll end up with a wonky red thing on your head, and you said you were tired of wonky.

Jim Becker is just as bad. You post a phot of something and you're liable to wind up with a post from Jim... "here's an avatar for ya!"

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You don't give a lot of details on what is your problem, so here is my advice re: Avatars. First, make it a close up, or you won't see details of your face at all. Second, make it as large as possible while still fitting under the 19k limit that they have here.

That's all I do. And mine doesn't look ... okay, actually it does. But that was intentional!

[Joash Boyton]

Well, actually I was offered one of those wonky floppy things....no thanks, that's only for people that believe in Santa(I don't)

Okay, I sent Mr. Hart a photo, and he resized it, touched it up etc:, and then he sent it back to me, and then I uploaded it, still no change....

Anything else?

Joash

[Bob Childress]

Joash,

You don't look any wonkier than usual to me. Have you checked a mirror?

[Joash Boyton]

????????????

[Jim Becker]

Avatars must be no larger than 50x50 pixels and be less than 19k in file size. When I create them, I work with Photoshop Elements to crop a "full-size" picture for the "scene" and deal with color, brightness and contrast. The better the quality of the original picture, the better the avatar. Mark Singer's is a good example...I had a great photo to start out with... I then resize the picture to as close to 50x50 pixels as possible without having either dimension exeed 50 pixels. Sharpen the picture to restore detail and then use te blur tool to make the background recede into well...the background. (Occasionally I need to actually edit out the background and replace it with just a solid, soft color) Finally, I've been finding that rather than saving as a JPG, I save as a GIF. In these small sizes, the quality and color seems to stay acceptable despite the limited color set and many of the avatars I create are only in the 3-5kb size which saves bandwidth.