Making avatars

[trekkiedane]

You know who was particularly good? Angry Angel, he sure was. Wish he popped by and posted some advice for those who are interested.

^ Pretty sure he used Photoshop and Imageready. That what I use.

He often would add a static layer over an animated gif to create a window of animation. That not only looks cool, it goes a long way toward reducing file size to fit the board's rather restrictive GIF size limits while allowing for minimal image degradation during the optimization process.

I learned to do this stuff for back-in-the-day av contests, myself. Mostly so i could compete with AA, actually.

Everything I know abut the art of avatar-making I've learned by studying the ones AA made in the contests back in the day

 

[Sector 7]

I am so awesome... don't I have a wonderful avatar... thank you very much... I did it all by myself.
p.s.- I also have a bridge to nowhere in Alaska I'd like you to buy.
Chris3123 made my beautiful animated avatar!

As far as viewing and resizing pictures, I use FSViewer. It is very simple (and free)... which is a must for me. For adjusting a still picture (enhance, adjust clarity, colors, etc.) I use MS Office Picture Manager which came with MS Office. Anything beyond that and I ask for help from good Samaritans like Chris3123.

 

[Niorah]

He often would add a static layer over an animated gif to create a window of animation.

Those are exactly the ones I was thinking about!

 

[Capn Flukie]

I use Paint Shop Pro 7 and it's companion program Animation Shop 4 for just about everything. I like being able to pull individual frames from an animated .gif in Animation Shop into PSP to tweak them.

I've made hundreds of avatars.

My favorite thing though was when I broadcast an entire episode of LOST through my avatar.

 

[PKTrekGirl]

I use PhotoShop and ImageReady. Although I also have PaintShop Pro.

Ice, take a look at the graphics projects I have in my photos on Facebook. I started using Photoshop as a rank beginner...and just started doing tutorials back in the day on LiveJournal - You'd be surprised how much you can learn about Photoshop on LJ! Not sure if it's that way anymore, but there used to be a ton of tuts on there...and I found a few artists that I liked, and did their tuts (including a couple for animated .gifs). After a while, I began to develop my own style..and went from there. Had a graphics journal on LJ for a long time - I'd have to check and see if it's still there though!

Now I'm doing tuts at Deviant Art (these are much harder) and learning photo manip at a much more advanced level, when I get in the mood to learn more. It's fun.

I don't do that much stuff around here - for a long time I focused on making stuff for the Classic Film community, because there are a lot fewer people in that sort of community who are good with computers in general, let alone something like PS. But I've made a few things for scifi....

I think the best free instruction out there is for PhotoShop. There are simply a ton of resources online to teach you all kinds of things. Of course, PhotoShop is not free, so there is that. But once you have it, it's an awesome tool with seemingly limitless possibilities. I'm still learning new stuff about PhotoShop, and I've been mucking about with it on and off for about 3-4 years now.

 

[Drago-Kazov]

I know i am bumping, but i don't want to start a new thread. How do i cut out an image from a pic and use it as avatar in photoshopportable?

I had no idea this thread was ancient. i was looking at threads started by the threadstarter and i assumed it has to be new.

 

[trekkiedane]

I'd think there is a helpful board somewhere with all the little tricks and tips you could ever need for using Photoshop Portable.

Perhaps here: http://www.fstutorials.com/photoshop/cropping/tutorials/

BUT I'm not familiar with that family of applications... someone who is, might drip in shortly...

The bumping is perfectly OK! We're always told that we shouldn't do it unless we have something new to add to the thread - but you did have just that



Alternatively, PhotoBucket (and probably most other image hosts) offers a built in lightweight editor that has cropping ability

 

[auntiehill]

Photobucket is SOOOO easy that even dumb-ass me can use it. It really is ridiculously easy for the basic stuff like cropping, resizing and adding text.