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| A guide to uploading avatars | |
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| Tweet Topic Started: Apr 9 2013, 03:58 PM (206 Views) | |
| Mαri ♖ | Apr 9 2013, 03:58 PM Post #1 |
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avatar (c) owner
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Okay, so this is a neat little trick you can use to upload your avatars if it says the KB is too big/larger than the maximum amount, which is 35. It works with any program that allows you to save images -yes, even the Paint one for Windows users. Also, as a little note, Zetaboards isn't trying to be mean to you when it tells you the image size is too big. 35 KB is actually a really good size compared to some other web servers allow. And this guide has some tips on how to make avatars stand out/help in the opacity process. First, a little contents page to guide you through the process and effects and et cetera. Table Of Contents--- * What Is KB? * Saving/Exporting The Image * Programs To Use * Black/White Features * Cropping --one~* What is KB? KB stands for kilobyte, which is a form of digital information storage, data storage, memory, or raw data. It is actually the third smallest in a list of data properties. It goes from a bit, to a byte {1024 bits}, to a kilobyte {1024 bytes}, and so on. It's most commonly abbreviated as 'K' or 'KB'. This is what you will most commonly see when looking at the properties of an image. Though at times, it can show a megabyte {or, MB, which is 1024 kilobytes, so one unit higher} instead, or along with. --two~* Saving/Exporting the image Now, when you get an error, saying the image size {or kilobytes!} is too large, what you want to do is reduce the image's KB. How do you do that? Well, there are a number of ways. Firstly, you want to either save the image to your computer, or copy it by going directly to the image, right-clicking with your mouse on the image, and clicking the copy option. --Paint Starting, there is a very basic way to do this that doesn't require you to download a big, fancy graphical program, or purchase one. On most computers, you have a drawing program called Paint. No, not Paint.net, just regular Paint. If you don't know where it is, and you've looked around, go to the start menu and search it, and it should appear. If it doesn't, don't panic, just continue reading. Now, for those of you who have copied the image, and found the program, you want to open it and paste the image in there. Make sure there is no white surrounding the image, or it will appear with the image when you go and save it. For those of you who have saved the image, click on the file tab in Paint and go to the open option, and find your picture. Now, if you did not find the program, what you need to do is go and save the picture to your computer. Once you've got that taken care of, go to the location you have saved the image, and right-click on the correct thumbnail of your image. One of the many options that should have appeared will have been 'open with'. You want to hover your mouse over that, and you should see the Paint program. Click on it. Get rid of the white. Next, go directly to the save option, and click save as. Under file type, select either of the following that appears ".jpg, .jpeg, .jfif, .jpe" And then click save. Now look back at the image's properties {don't know how? right click it's thumbnail, and go to the properties option} and see how much it's lowered. Testing this, I reduced a 826 KB picture to a 350 KB picture. That's a lot, right? --Gimp Using Gimp, you'll need to download it if you do not already have it. It's a free download, so there's no worry. c: To start, do the same thing I had you do with Paint. Save or copy the direct image. Now, open gimp up. Don't worry about a template or anything like that for the moment. If you've copied the image {which is the best and easiest thing to do} right click inside gimp and click paste. If you've saves it, you can either open up the folder it's in and drag it into Gimp, right-click and select open with, then Gimp, or go to file in Gimp, open, and select your image. Now, once you've gotten that out of the way, you want to hover your mouse over the file option, and go down to the 'save' and 'save as' options. Under those options should be options to 'export the image'. Click on that. Now where it says name, delete everything in that box, type in the name you want for your picture, and put either .jpg or .jpeg at the end of it. Then you need to go down to where it says export, the button, and right above it should be a drop-down menu for file types. Scroll through that and select the one that says ".JPG" or ".JPEG" Then hit that export button. Up should pop a little box that states you're exporting the image as a .JPEG file. What you want to do is find a bar that says Quality and set it to sixty {60}. After that, click save and you're done! Go back and see how much KB you've lowered on your image. Now, if this still isn't quite enough, you might need to reduce the image bandwidths to 300 by 300, and lower if desired. It won't change the size of it on here by much, though. --Photoshop In Photoshop, it is relatively the same. All you want to do is get the image into the software, and go to the file drop-down menu. From there, find the 'save for web' option and click on that, setting the file type to .JPG or .JPEG and reducing the quality to sixty {60} or lower if necessary. --Imaging Programs These are programs specifically designed to reduce the file size of your image. There is a list to chose from below, or try finding one on your own. After downloading and opening it, you want to look for options such as “Image Size,” “Resize,” or “Resample.” When you use this command you will be presented with a dialog box for entering the exact pixels you wish to use. When you resize your image, you want to make sure the “Constrain proportions” option is enabled so that the program won't distort or majorly pixel-ize your image in the process of resizing it. --three~* Programs to use graphics programs Most commonly, I see people using the three that I used on step two. However, there are a large variety. And really, most any graphical program can do this. -Sumopaint -Paint.net -Illustrator -Paint -Gimp -Photoshop -MSPaint -Photoshop Elements -Photoshop CS -Indesign -Art Rage -Corel Draw -Streamline Imaging Programs These programs are specifically designed for you to flit around with your image. Whether it's to reducing image size, to putting text onto it, these are going to get you there. The most popular are at the top. There are many more, I'm just listing the ones I know about. -Picture Window Pro -Picasa -Irfanview -Microsoft Image Resizer -Resize2mail -Outlook {e-mail service, create an account and e-mail the photo to yourself, and it will automatically resize it or offer to} -Snapfiles --four~* Black and White Features Another thing you can try is picking the color out of your image. The easiest way to do this is to try saving your image as a .GIF file type, and it will give you the option to pick out the colors you don't want in the image. Though, you can use "color-picker" options in your average paint/graphic programs. If you're okay with it, the smartest thing to do with it is to only have the two non-colors in your picture, which are black and white. When it only has these two, there are certain things going on. One, is that color in an image is actually taking up bits. Each pixel in an image of black and white is only one byte, while in a color image, each pixel is three bytes -which would be one byte each for red, green and blue. So if your image has purple, that would mean the pixels with purple would be the bytes, considering it has both red and blue in them. Even a pixel with a light green is more than just green. Actually, light green is a certain amount of red and green, while a darker green is blue and green. That, or I could be horribly confused with myself, and each pixel has all three colors in it. We'll go with that. So anyways, 1024 bytes equal one kilobyte. So the more color your image has, the more bytes it will have, and the more kilobytes it will have. Going back, if you pick the image colors down to black and white, it gets rid of a lot of bytes, which reduces the file. It also means that you can reduce the quality of the image to a low number without worrying about messing the picture up. Who knows, you might find that by only having black and white in the picture, it makes it look more dramatic. c:--five~* Cropping Okay, one more, and then I'll be out of your hair. Firstly, what is cropping? ". . .removal of the outer parts of an image to improve framing, . . ." -taken from Google. So basically, you're cutting blank spaces of an image, or parts you don't want. For example, if you have a white image, with a picture of a person on the left side, you would crop off the right side of the image since it was just blank white space. Now remember, black and white colors in pixels still take up to one byte, so by chopping off empty white space that you don't want in an image, it's reducing the image's size. This can be done in any graphics program you might have, or really, your average image uploading website {such as, Imgur, Photobucket, etc.} Now, with a crop feature, you might be thinking you'll be slyly getting away with stealing a picture. That is NOT how it works. Remember to always use creative commons images. All cropping the copyright off of a picture does is gets you in trouble. So, DO NOT do it. I am not encouraging the practice in that, either. This is a warning, and how to crop an image responsibly. Besides the natural "rectangle-shape" cropping, there is a slightly different way you can do this. Open your graphics program with the desired image and select the 'eraser' tool. Now, depending on the program you're using, there are two things that can happen. You can erase everything you don't want in the image and it turn white {WHICH, is still very good, considering you're cutting down on colored pixels, which is more bytes!} or it turns into a checkered light-and-dark gray pattern. The second is called transparency. It might look a little weird, but it's used that way to easily identify itself as being transparent, as opposed to a solid color, which you might confuse with the image's color. If you get the transparency pattern, this is better. Transparency in this state means that where the checkered pattern is, nothing will appear when you put down the image. Which means, if a website's background color is blue, when you post the image, everything that was checkered will now be blue. This is pretty handy because instead of reducing the bytes in the pixels, you're completely wiping out each pixel that's in a transparent area, and therefore reducing the file size of the image. GUIDE © MARI Edited by Mαri ♖, Jul 19 2013, 11:21 PM.
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sporbliss && colorwheel pm me if you need any of my characters ![]() Character Gallery || Template Shoppe | |
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| Sparky! ♥ | Apr 9 2013, 04:01 PM Post #2 |
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Darkforest Demon
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>>>>Tracking<<<<< |
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| Skip | Apr 27 2013, 05:45 AM Post #3 |
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Darkforest Demon
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-tracking Can't wait to see the finished product!
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| Sneakers | May 16 2013, 09:28 PM Post #4 |
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hearty's my biotch
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I'm pretty sure Dots has something like this stickied already? Unless if you are adding more to it or whatever. --Tracking anyways!! ^^EDIT: Nope, nevermind. she just says how to upload an avvie XD Edited by Sneakers, May 16 2013, 09:29 PM.
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Nighty was here ✘ JOIN BONECLAN ✘ ![]() ★ heatstar ★ cinnamontwist ★ spottedfawn ★ delinquentstare ★ bear ★ | |
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| ❤Torn❤ | May 19 2013, 02:12 AM Post #5 |
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Tracking, everything I try to upload says it's too big. Then again I'm on my iPod. |
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| Mαri ♖ | Jul 19 2013, 11:22 PM Post #6 |
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-pants- THE SUSPENSE IS OVER in other words, i've finished c: |
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sporbliss && colorwheel pm me if you need any of my characters ![]() Character Gallery || Template Shoppe | |
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So anyways, 1024 bytes equal one kilobyte. So the more color your image has, the more bytes it will have, and the more kilobytes it will have. Going back, if you pick the image colors down to black and white, it gets rid of a lot of bytes, which reduces the file. It also means that you can reduce the quality of the image to a low number without worrying about messing the picture up. Who knows, you might find that by only having black and white in the picture, it makes it look more dramatic. c:




7:37 PM Jul 10