Avatar question/help

Marksist · Post by **Marksist** » 2004-12-09 02:49pm

I was wondering how I could make the white in my avatar be "see-through" like Durandal's on Mozilla? So that around the head and the purple stuff it would be just be the skin of the forum.

Any help or information on if/how I can do this would be much appreciated, thanks.

Post by **Dalton** » 2004-12-09 02:56pm

You'll have to create a transparency mask and save it as a GIF or PNG.

moku · Post by **moku** » 2004-12-10 12:49am

Yeah, make it transparent. Add a transparent layer, shove it as the background layer, and then erase away. Save. Of course there are some steps missed out which can make your work easier (selection, etc...).

If you don't feel up to it, I can do it. Good luck.

darthdavid · Post by **darthdavid** » 2004-12-10 01:13am

Well that's what I get for working tired and quickly...

moku · Post by **moku** » 2004-12-10 01:22am

Liike that, only it looks a tad better. David, you wanna do it again when you're not tired, feel free.

darthdavid · Post by **darthdavid** » 2004-12-10 01:27am

moku wrote:Liike that, only it looks a tad better. David, you wanna do it again when you're not tired, feel free.

If he doesn't get around to it I will

moku · Post by **moku** » 2004-12-10 01:41am

Saves me doing it.

Cheers.

Marksist · Post by **Marksist** » 2004-12-10 04:35am

I have Ifranview and Microsoft paint, and I'm not sure exactly how to make the transparency mask that Dalton and moku were referring to

Is there some program I could download to do that with? What David did was exactly what I was referring to though, and that would be very excellent if one of the pros could do it, I'd be much obliged.

But, as they say; "give a man a fish, he eats for a day, teach a man to fish, he eats for a lifetime," so learning would be super too.

Thanks a bunch!

moku · Post by **moku** » 2004-12-10 04:50am

This task is quite easy, and simple. I could do it.
And you need a 2D editing program, which can deal with layers, such as the expensive Photoshop. Try using Gimp. I would only recommend for professionals and artists who have an art career to buy a full version of PS.

If you use Gimp (which is probably what david used too, since he uses Debian Linux), we could both show you how to do it - if you would like to.

Cheers.

darthdavid · Post by **darthdavid** » 2004-12-10 08:50pm

yeah I use gimp. Just go to http://gimp.org , download it and once you've done that and got it fired up post back here and I'll help ya along (I would've done it for you but I stayed up too late last night and now i'm all wobbly and shit and cant work the mouse with enough finesse to not have it come out looking like crap).

moku · Post by **moku** » 2004-12-10 09:01pm

...and cant work my mouse...

In other words, we should wait until david is sober.

Hey, david, how good are you in using Gimp? You probably are ahead of me -- care to teach me some stuff?

darthdavid · Post by **darthdavid** » 2004-12-10 09:15pm

Sure, Like what? (and just to let you know I normally have shakey hands and have trouble enough working my mouse precisely, when I stay up far too late it only compounds matters, so i'm not drunk, just tired)

moku · Post by **moku** » 2004-12-10 10:04pm

darthdavid wrote:Sure, Like what? (and just to let you know I normally have shakey hands and have trouble enough working my mouse precisely, when I stay up far too late it only compounds matters, so i'm not drunk, just tired)

Well, I have a grasp of layers, the basic tools and such. Just think of a piece of artwork you've created, and then could you show me how to go about doing something similar...

I'd really like that.

darthdavid · Post by **darthdavid** » 2004-12-10 10:44pm

In that case, I know the perfect website for you http://gug.sunsite.dk/ . I've learned how to do so many neat things from there, it's amazing.

moku · Post by **moku** » 2004-12-10 10:57pm

David, I have searched for something like that for eternity! Thank you so much!! Anything you want, tell me, and I'll do my best.

I have over 800 MB of misc images. Anything?

darthdavid · Post by **darthdavid** » 2004-12-11 02:18am

Thought You'd like it

.

moku · Post by **moku** » 2004-12-11 04:01am

Yeah... I've begun to cruise the entire site. Learnt quite a few thingies already.

Only annoying thing is that their forum sucks...

Marksist · Post by **Marksist** » 2004-12-11 04:25am

Thanks for all the help so far guys... I downloaded Gimp, have been playing around with that, figured out how to do layers, and I made it have an invisible background layer, and then I erased around it to the image I want, only bad thing is that I don't know what file extension to use so it isn't too big, or that it gets "exported" correctly.

EDIT: I figured that it is .png but, I can't seem to get it below 17KB, and it avatars have to be less than 6KB. hmm

moku · Post by **moku** » 2004-12-11 05:05am

Whoa!? Finally I see someone that reads the fuckin manual, or is smart to begin with! Cool. You did exceptionally well - downloading gimp, and figuring out about layers in one day. Most people I see elswhere on other forums don't even know where to download it after I direct them to gimp.org.

Anyhow, PS has a function that allows you to save it into a "web friendly file", which cuts down the file size. With Gimp I haven't come across such a function, but - it is easy as to get the same result.

First off, your avatar need not be a .png make it a gif or jpeg file. PNG is a good file format for files that you want to have a maximum quality with, simply because when you use a more compressed file format, like jpeg, your image looses quality - which is not visible to the naked eye. Only when you zoom in by about 4x -- 8x you can begin to see the difference.

So... save it into .jpg format. See if that cuts down the size. If it ain't, save your file, after you've merged all layers (layers > merge layers - or something like that), save it into the native Gimp file format (for PS it's .psd), which is .xcf. You will notice that suddenly your file is either much bigger or much smaller. Nevermind what. Now open that xcf file again and save it into jpg.

Done. That should do the trick. If not, whilst exporting, just grab the quality bar and decrease it by about 15%. Won't be visible to the naked eye, but will definitely decrease the file size immensly.

Cheers.

PS - check out GUG, in david's post above. *Extremely* handy for any Gimp users.

Ohh, yeah -- welcome into graphics (and Open Source software)!

Hope you enjoy it. =]

Tsyroc · Post by **Tsyroc** » 2004-12-11 11:13am

I did this with Paintbrush in a couple of minutes.

So with a little more care and perhaps a better color selection for the background transparency it could look pretty good without having to download any software.

Paint lets you make gifs with transparent backgrounds. You just have to go under Image and then select attributes.

The backgound is a little bit of a pain in the picture you have because it isn't already one color. That makes it a little harder to make the transparent color.

I also lost a little resolutions in switching the picture from jpg to gif.

Cyborg Stan · Post by **Cyborg Stan** » 2004-12-11 02:19pm

If your avatars seem to be around in the 17 KB range, it's because you have to decrease the color depth. In addition, unless if you want animation (Or if your filesize is extremely tiny - less than 400 bytes) then PNG is better than GIF in almost everything. Here's what I managed to do in PSP in conjunction with PNGOUT, a utility that converts and decreases filesizes in PNG.

PNG, 6141 bytes

moku : He did specifically want transparency, so JPEG is out.

moku · Post by **moku** » 2004-12-11 06:57pm

Ahhh, my bad. Okay, jpeg is out since we want transparency -- so try the PNGOUT which Stan suggested. Thanks.

Durandal · Post by **Durandal** » 2004-12-12 12:27am

My avatar works because it's basically only a very limited palette of colors. PNG is a lossless compression scheme, so if you have too many colors in your avatar, you'll violate the 6 kB limit no matter what if you try using an 8-bit alpha channel, like I do. There's no way you could make your avatar a PNG-24 with an 8-bit alpha channel and have it fall under 6 kB.

darthdavid · Post by **darthdavid** » 2004-12-12 01:51am

Well he could always save it as a GIF. That'll probably come in under the limit and it even supports binary transparency (what he wants!

)

moku · Post by **moku** » 2004-12-12 02:48am

Yeah, gif is your next best choice. Is there any other format that would be suitable, apart from gif?