Avatar Touch-Up for any Member!

These look great, Dan. Thanks for taking the time.

Now . . . Just take the rings off of those wheels!

 

You did a fine job. Thanks for your contribution.

Nick

 

I checked it on Mac Safari and IE 7 on my XP-based laptop, they look fine on both of those, like Firefox. Not sure what it was about IE 6 on LCD screen at work. I've had some problems matching colors when putting something online, but that wasn't using transparency. As I said, it was pretty subtle, definitely not worth worrying about. What Hobbit was doing, we still don't know.

 

Nick: How many Prii do you have, anyway? They just keep passing through your avatar, one after the other.

 

It just looks like a lot of cars - actually, I'm going in circles.

Nick

 

"Blessed are they who travel in circles, for they shall be known as Big Wheels"

 

just a quick update, i run various combo's of machines, displays and OS's and on my 21" CRT (ancient beast) with XP set to performance mode, i see what a lot of people see... the jagged edges, etc... but on "beauty mode" it does look much better.... the LCD seems to look better in performance mode and beauty mode...

the Mac Laptop looks good without any adjustments.

 

For what it's worth, I used one of Dan's avatars to create the animated GIF I use for my avatar.

Nick

 

Dan,

Thank you for the 2008 Prius avatars.

And thank you for your offer to touch up people's individual avatar.

Was that your handiwork on efusco's avatar?

 

I do too. I think your avatar went from a little mundane to kind of pizzazzy. The transperency effect really highlights the angle shot of your Prius nicely.

 

Okay, I see what you're trying to do now. I pulled a couple of
the avatars into GIMP for a closer look. Now please keep in mind
that when I'm not reading Priuschat on my clanky old 110 baud ASR33
teletype, I *do* have GUI browsers available to me, so I can see
this stuff when I take a notion to.
.
However, as fine as the effort is, transparency *is* going to
come up a big different in different browsers, and the effectiveness
of using it has much to do with the default background color
that the browser presents. If the transparency fades the immediate
periphery of the car nicely off into the background you've got a
wonder floating-in-space effect; if, say, dark grey shadows fade
off into stark whitespace [like in IE] then maybe it doesn't work
as well. I'd still think one would be better off with a "solid"
picture, and just pick a well-framed image.
.
The animated stuff is fun [I like passthru's hack, quite clever]
and in fact I have an in-progress rework of my own kicking around
somewhere that attempted to animate changing the light angle
and lengthening the shadow, as though time is passing in the day.
But as much as I tried to optimize the animation layers, the
filesize was still way too big to use as an avatar.
.
I'm also sort of hesitant to go changing avatars frequently since
people pick up on those immediate visual cues as to who's who, and
if a new picture comes up they get thrown a little until they
read the text for the poster's name.
.
_H*

 

Hi! and thanks for doing the avatars. I was wondering where the nice new avatars came from. Well done.
-Brad

 

Just found this topic. What a nice gesture! izza: Thanks! Keri

 

I just found this thread today, and I will take Dan up on the offer. I cannot figure out how to get rid of the bar on the end of my avitar that looks like I am doing a crash test into a wall or something.

Couldn't figure out how to attach a file to the PM either, so I hope Dan can use this one.

 

Yes, nice gesture.
Both sides of this .png discussion are right.

Solution?

Use the background color from the column where the avatar sits (instead of transparency) as the background layer on the avatars - like I did!

Smaller file size, more consistent cross-browser display.
.

 

Transparent backgrounds rock! Though I notice that mine shows up as a faint blue color in IE6. Great in most others though! I had a professional do mine.