These look great, Dan. Thanks for taking the time. Now . . . Just take the rings off of those wheels!
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.
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*
Hobbit - thanks for the specification. I really appreciate the info. I use PNG as an image format because it supports high-color images and gradient transparency. One of the hardest effects to apply is anti-aliasing through transparency because of the possible background colors. I alter the images in the highest resolution I can get my hands on, first by punching the cars out on a white background, then by punching the white background out into transparency; finally I select the transparency, invert it so I've got the whole car selected, then contract the selection by a few pixels (depending upon image size), invert again and blur or soften to my liking. When PNGs are properly functional, this gets me a nice "fade-to-transparent" effect that resizes reasonably well. The goal is to eliminate the raggedy edges and make it compatible with all background colors, but at 150x100 pixels it's not as flexible as the file format permits. Take Evan's car as an example; I had to sacrifice some of the top and bottom of the image (his original photo had clipped some of the bottom of the shadow anyway) to maximize the visible size of the car. I'm happy with how it came out and I very much appreciate the compliments. I'm also still glad to do the same for anyone. ~ dan ~
Hi! and thanks for doing the avatars. I was wondering where the nice new avatars came from. Well done. -Brad
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.
