B.T. Isaac's avatar thread - More Random Awys

[B.T. Isaac]

Wellkome to my avatar thread. This post starts with the oldest avys I made (JPEGs) followed by the more recent ones. You are free to use any of them I you like.





















I got bored this weekend. Here's what I did.

[Dayantis]

They look good, other than .jpeg compression artefacts. Try saving as .png instead, it'll look better.

Good though! ^_^

[BtEtta]

Some nice work there, but somewhat marred but excessive JPEG artifacts. What program are you using to create them, perhaps you should look into its settings dialogs and see if you can set a higher quality value when saving JPEGs.

Or use PNG.

[B.T. Isaac]

I use Photoshop. I'll try PNG format next time. Thanks for the advise.

[Illusionist]

Groovay.

[cidhighwind767]

How do you actually get them into a thread?
I have stuff at the house I'd put up, but I don't know how.
Some very good stuff BTW.
Just put it into PNG and they'll be fine.

[azrael_2001]

You are saving the original edits as a .PSD, right? as in, these are just the .JPG's you made from the original files and there are still .PSD's somewhere on your HDD?

Anyway, to get pictures online, there are many many services that will host random pics for free, such as the ever-popular http://www.imageshack.com or my personal favourite, http://www.Photobucket.com
Just upload your pics to one of those and paste the URL they give you between [img]tags[/img] like that.
Do it right and you get something like this:

The same process works for .sig banners as well.

[B.T. Isaac]

You are saving the original edits as a .PSD, right? as in, these are just the .JPG's you made from the original files and there are still .PSD's somewhere on your HDD?

Uhh... I didn't really understood that, could you be a little clearer, if possible? Anyway, I just cropped, coloured and resized the images, and got these JPG's I uploaded. What exactly is the problem with JPG's? Just wondering.

[xyzzy_n]

The problem with the JPEG format is that its compression loses information from the image and introduces compression artefacts which are especially noticeable in images with lots of lines. Use PNG for most avatars and indeed images, GIF for animated avatars, JPEG for photography and scans. And always keep a copy in the format of your graphics software with separate layers etc.

I ought to write an FAQ, but I suspect somebody already has done that and people just don

[R3@P3R]

Talking about animated, my home computer doesn't "play" them. I just get to see the first picture. Does anyone know something about this?
I have Zonealarm as my firewall. and IE6 as my browser.

[Tyris]

That all said, PNG has its own problems in that you have only 256 colours, not 16 million.

[xyzzy_n]

That all said, PNG has its own problems in that you have only 256 colours, not 16 million.

You mean GIF. PNG does, in fact, support 2²⁴ ≈ 16.8 million colours.

[azrael_2001]

You are saving the original edits as a .PSD, right? as in, these are just the .JPG's you made from the original files and there are still .PSD's somewhere on your HDD?

Uhh... I didn't really understood that, could you be a little clearer, if possible? Anyway, I just cropped, coloured and resized the images, and got these JPG's I uploaded. What exactly is the problem with JPG's? Just wondering.

Photoshop has its own native file format which preserves everything about the image, from the layers and masks you may have used to the undo history (I think). That format is .PSD and takes up rather more space than a .jpg or .png which is one of the reasons it is not used as an inline image format. jpg's and png's on the other hand don't preserve any of that useful information, though they are much smaller and therfore suitable for transmission over limited bandwidth connections.
Most people will, when working with a program like photoshop save one copy of whatever they're working on in the native format in case they ever want to go back and change stuff and one or more compressed copies suitable for transfer over the internet.

[Tyris]

That all said, PNG has its own problems in that you have only 256 colours, not 16 million.

You mean GIF. PNG does, in fact, support 2²⁴ ≈ 16.8 million colours.

Then why do all my PNGs open in 2⁸ = 256 colours?

[B.T. Isaac]

Wow. Thanks for the advises. I'll check them when makeing the next avatars. I will not redo these ones though. I already went thru a lot of trouble just colouring, posting, removeing, reposting etc to get them in the thread. Consider them tests.

[xyzzy_n]

Then why do all my PNGs open in 2⁸ = 256 colours?

Because you save them that way? Or did you forget to sacrifice a goat to Shannon, the god of compression?

[BtEtta]

That all said, PNG has its own problems in that you have only 256 colours, not 16 million.

You mean GIF. PNG does, in fact, support 2²⁴ ≈ 16.8 million colours.

Not to mention the fact that PNG also supports 256 levels of opacity on each pixel in the image.

You can save palleted PNGs though, and if you open a GIF file and save it out as PNG without explicitly changing anything you will most likely get such a file (though it'll almost certainly be smaller than the GIF).

[B.T. Isaac]

I've updated my list of avatars, and I would really appreciate some feedback on them.

I was thinking of posting some strips I coloured. Can I post them here, or is there some sort of trick with posting them them?

[Illusionist]

Holy wow have you been busy.

Nice avys!

[xyzzy_n]

I was thinking of posting some strips I coloured.

Please see [url=http://forums.keenspot.com/viewtopic.php?p=1194878#1194878]Dan

[B.T. Isaac]

Wow. Thanks for the warning. There's no way I could have found this myself. I almost made a really big mistake.

[BtEtta]

I've updated my list of avatars, and I would really appreciate some feedback on them.

I was thinking of posting some strips I coloured. Can I post them here, or is there some sort of trick with posting them them?

My you have been busy, excellent work.

The following are the new ones. They are all PNG, exept for the jeremy avatar, wich was too large, and I had to compress it.

Depending on how much over the limit it was you might have had some success taking it under the limit with PNGOUT (the command-line version is free.)

[Kelvandil]

I was thinking of posting some strips I coloured.

Please see [url=http://forums.keenspot.com/viewtopic.php?p=1194878#1194878]Dan

[B.T. Isaac]

I was thinking of posting some strips I coloured.

Please see [url=http://forums.keenspot.com/viewtopic.php?p=1194878#1194878]Dan

[B.T. Isaac]

Well, I updated again. Like allways, I would appreciate some feedback.