a little avatar help!!!???
 

Ugh! I'm so ready to get a new (animated :rolleyes: ) avatar up, with BOTH my precious doggies. And I'm DETERMINED to learn how to do it myself! :rolleyes:

Villette NICELY sent me the program she has, and BabyFidgette gave me a little advice, but I'm still having trouble. I hope someone can give me some advice on getting it down to size!!!!

Here's the deal:

I'm not a donating member. I have two pictures (shrunk to proper 75x75 pixels), and two animated name frames....just a solid color background with the name moving into it, then stopping.

I've tried several different methods of getting the file down to size, but it's like 34KB, and it's supposed to be 19.5...something like that?

What am I doing wrong? BabyFidgette sd. that she THOUGHT I ought to be able to have some animation and keep it under the limit.

I've run the "optimization wizard", but don't know how to set the options. Should color be at 256?

What about "dither value"? (which I know nothing about!!!) It's at 100% right now.

Any other advice you can give me would be appreciated!

ahhh.. I wish I could help you but you probably know more about the animating than I do. good luck.

Hey! The thing is is that the animation part is probably taking up too many frames. I can usually fit about 5-8 frames when I am making someone an avatar. How many frames does yours have? If you post it here, I can take a look at it for you. ;)

AHA! Way more frames than that! :D Thanks....when I get a minute, I'll twiddle with it and see it that helps. :)

That's what I figured it was! You got "word" happy! LOLOL :D I usually go in and start deleting some frames. That usually works.

Oh, and if color is at 256, it takes up more room. Try putting it down to 127. That's what my avatar is at now.

And I have no idea what dither is! LOL

How did she send you the program? could you send it to me i really want to make my own to she said she would make one for me i just hate to be a bother let me know thanks!:thumbup: :D

If you send her a pm, should would be glad to send it to you I think! She is a GREAT and kind lady!

Her handle is (I think! :p) "red98vett"----something like that. Well, you know how to track her down, since she was already talking to you on a thread, duh!

good luck! It's been a slow process for me, but I'm finally figuring it out....with help! :D

Villette sent me the same program, thank you Villette!!:thumbup:

So if you need to figure something out just ask me, it took some time messing around with it but I have it all figured out now!!

If you put the dither button down, the file size will go down. You have to do it alot though before you see the size going down. You don't want to go down to far though or else the quality of the picture will be messed up. Dither means you are reducing the color, which you can reduce alot without even seeing a difference. You start off at 256 and you have to go down. Also, make sure that you pictures are at the correct size.

Even though the picture looks perfect in the canvas screen, there may be alot of excess of picture that you are not using, so go the smallest you can while you can still see the picture. This will drastically decrease your file size. I had a picture that looked perfect in the screen, just had a picture of my Scampers but there was all the extra stuff so I changed the pixels, (length and width) and it reduced the file size but it still kept the orginal picture of Scampers, it just made all the excess stuff that was not being seen smaller which reduces the file size. Am I making sense?? Well let me know if you need any help!!

Okay....I'll be honest....I'm not sure I'm following you. :D

I cropped my pictures in another program....trimmed them really close, and then changed the photo size to the 75x75. I was wondering if I had the photo quality set too high or something, though?

Oh well, I have some good ideas for things to try now! Thanks for the offer for help....I may have to take you up on it! :D

How many pictures are you putting on it? And you said that you had animation on the names, correct? Well depending on what animation you are using, you could have too many frames. The animation takes up alot of space and you have to make sure you are not using too many frames. The quality of the photo is the very last thing you want to change, so if you changed everything else then you can lower the quality by using the dither button.
Well if you get stuck let me know. If it comes to it, you can post the pictures and tell me what you are trying to do and I can figure what is going wrong and tell you how to fix it.:)

I THINK maybe I have it!!!!! Going to check....

YAAAAAY!!!!! THANKS EVERYONE for the help!!!!

I'm so happy to have BOTH my pretty poocha-luchas on there now! :luv:

Congrats, you did it!!! It looks great!!:good job:
So just out of curiosity, what did you have to change??

Ummmm, a little bit of everything. :D Turned color down to 150, dither to 75%, and cut out a lot of the animation frames! :D

Villette did mine she did a great job. Thanks so much Villette.