Maximum PC

ok, i can get an avatar. IM SORRY ABOUT THIS POST! how ae u guys capable of getting ur avatars. they can only be 8kb or w/e. i tried ur guys but theyre too much, so how do u get urs under the limit? i want to know. im sorry about this and i hated when ppl kept asking about avatars.
a quick answer would be great. ill delete it right when i get a good answer.

Get Irfanview and mess with resizing and compression as necessary.

A few nifty options for saving space when making jpegs:

Save as progressive - usually saves a decent bit of space
Disable color subsampling - same, usually with no noticable difference.

Also you have the quality % slider, generally >70% doesn't make much of a difference.

I use photoshop elements, which is basically just loading the image, resizing it to the pixel limit, and then selecting 'save for web' which compresses and optimizes to make the file size smaller. Optimization is an important step, as it makes a series of educated guesses about how to reduce the file size without degrading the image much, mostly by making changes to the color pallette to reduce the colors used if i recall correctly. Suffice to say it makes file sizes smaller.

B4 I had elements, i think I was just using Paint (the free stuff in the your Accessories folder) to trim and resize, and a great little freeware program called GIF Optimizer to optimize and help keep file size down. If IrfanView can do it too though, thats great! It's a nifty program for lots of reasons, and I guess Urm just clued me in to another one. I only use it occasionally just for viewing stills, I guess I've never really poked around in it (or updated it for quite some time either). It's a great program!

I use the gimp to do all my work for me.

It's a very nifty little program. Photoshop elements might be a bit pricy for what he wants to do though...

Whats that gif optimizer program like? Does it give you lots of options for optimizing or does is it just a crappy little VB program with a button that says "optimise!" ?

This is a GREAT question!

I am not sure I can add much to the above, but I will give some general guidelines.

Know your resolution:
The current web standard for resolution is 74dpi. You don't get any pay-off for higher resolution images unless they are going to be printed or enlarged. Avatars don't fit this requirement.

Know your size:
Make the image the right size. An image 2x physical size takes up 4x the memory. So make sure to resize the image to 90pix wide (or tall) for an avatar. And of course, you want to keep the same proportions, so one dimension maybe less then 90pix.

Know your format:
For the web, two formats are best, .gif and .jpg. If the image is more like a photograph, use .jpg. If the image is more of a drawing or cartoon or other synthetic picture, use .gif.

Know your colors:
Colors take up memory in filespace. If your image is black and white, switch the color mode to greyscale. Next, only use the colors you need. Many image tools allow you to switch to indexed color. This means the file only stores the colors you use (or 256 selected colors, whichever is lower).

Some image software (ie. Photoshop) have a simple interface to do this and more for you. In Photodhop its called "save for web".

As an example of what can be done, I offer this:

Malin Space Sciences Image M0705959.gif (Mars MGS MOC NA Image):

Original Uncompressed: 81.1MB (2000x13,000 pix)
RGB original size: 23.8MB
resaving as grayscal (its a BW image anyway): 7.9MB
"save for web" as a .jpg at medium: 604.3KB

You can't tell the original from the web version - and thats without resizing. As you can see, the steps above can reduce an image size by 1-2 orders of magnitude with little noticable image quality loss.


Manta

I used CorelDraw. Loaded the image I wanted to work with, told it how wide and high and how many colours to use, then exported.

Word of advice, don't try for anything too detailed - i.e., fine lines - as the details tend to get lost.

hehe, well, I suppose one could say it's just a crappy little vb program, OR,one could say it is very streamlined and discrete program . It does what it does, does it free, does it fairly well and makes it very simple. It does not offer many bells and whistles, but it does give you a number of preset dithering and color pallete reduction options, and shows you what the new file size will be and the percentage reduction. You can load in a bunch of files and optimize them all in batch as well. It's reasonably well put together, and the price is right!

Edit: the program weighs in at less than a megabyte, too.

Just got done download the latest Irfanview, and played with it a bit. It continues to be a great little program, and the latest one seems even better. The additional image manipulation tools are nice, but are definitely there more for convenience than power. You can't tell how much of an effect compression or color depth reduction (optimization) will have on an images file size, making for a lot of guesswork. No preview of changes to the images is available either. Still, changes are easy to undo and filesizes are easy to see at the bottom of the interface, even if you don't know ahead of time what the filesize changes will be. The price is sure right, too, and it's still a nice little utility! Gif Optimizer still seems to offer a more streamlined and easy approach, as well as more options for optimizing and some nice features, but it is dedicated to just that one single task after all. Irfan, however has a lot else to offer besides.

Man I haven't used GIMP in forever - they've done some nice things with it - thanks for the reminder to another great little free app Jip!
Tuathal

I couldn't bear to watch your suffering any longer, so I gave you an avatar. If that's not the Dr. Satan you had in mind, link me up to a picture of him.

I was wondering about that. Where did that 'Dr. Satan' come from? I hadn't heard of it until seeing House of 1000 Corpses.

Dr. Satan, here's a couple of Avatars I made from some Pics I found using Google:

My Dr. Satan came first

Was he from a movie? If so, what movie? Looks interesting.

Thx Twballs-- Dr. Satan is now as lovely as ever.

Yer welcome.

So, where did that other Dr. Satan come from? I hadn't heard of it until House of 1000 Corpses. Was that from an old school horror movie?

he looks quite ugly to me.

LOL i had a dream that i ahd an avatar. It was kind of lame. I was just browsing and i saw one of my posts and i had an avatar. LMAO!

Intuition perhaps? I have a hunch that may be more of a prophecy than a dream

wats that mean?

Prophecy