A High Resolution Avatar for the non-techie

[Captain_K]

Can someone please let me know the right way to get a crisp and clean avatar. My hand drawn "comic" may not be the best starting point, but there's got to be a better way to clean it up so it can be viewed. I'm totally new to all this, never done it but in my limited way when I first started, so walk me through step by step. Such instructions would be nice in a section on the board "getting started"? So it helps the next illiterate like me

[Arduin]

You want to know how to draw better? Or, how to shrink pics...

[serleran]

The simplest solution is to rescan using a higher resolution.

Otherwise, you'd need to know how to use image editing software to make the current one more crisp.

[Captain_K]

The drawing is the drawing, it is either pencil or pen and ink, I can find the original soon. I can scan on a higher resolution, but I know this forum only takes certain avatar formats and they are not all equal and some folks have some pretty advanced avatars with special methods to do that.. that is what I'm looking for, the best way or special trick for detailed high res-image additions where the source is a pencil line drawing.

[alcyone]

It's going to be trial and error, but a few things:

If your scanner does TIFF use that instead of JPEG. 300 dpi should be good enough, but you can go higher if the scanner lets you and you have a fast computer to manipulate the image. Scan in black and white or grayscale and try the line art setting if you have one and see if it works for you.

With line art you probably want to get the image as black and white as possible unless you have shading to deal with. In comics they sometimes use half-tones for different shades. In Photoshop there is a Threshold adjustment you can use to adjust what gets included in the image so you don't get a grey paper background for instance. The GIMP will have something similar. Don't use Windows Paint. Other options are to crank up the brightness and contrast until you see just your lines, or to posterize to as few colors as possible.

Most image manipulation software have different algorithms you can use when scaling. Try a few different ones until you get what you like. If you have any adjustments to make in the image, do it before scaling.

You want to make sure the browser or PHPBB aren't doing the scaling for you because they will mess it up. Scale down (in one step, in your image manipulation software) to 150x150. That's as large as PHPBB will let your avatar be. Make sure you are selecting a square area (try holding down shift or alt or ctrl while dragging the select rectangle). If you don't have a square, crop it so it is square before scaling. I think it accepts .png images, so use those in preference to .jpg. GIF is probably actually fine too since you need very few colors unless your line art has a lot of shading.

You really aren't increasing resolution; that is a constant at 150x150. It will render better or worse depending on the pixel density and size of the display of whoever is viewing it. Look at the captions in your comic though. Is it likely that that text will fit into 150 pixels? Probably not.

There are lots of articles on cleaning up line art in Photoshop or The GIMP, so search for those if you are having trouble. If you decide to use a photo, it's all a lot easier; colorful, photorealistic images scale well and work well as JPGs and don't need as much messing around with.

[Captain_K]

thanks!