CAA: Christian Anime Alliance

Almost every avatar I try to apply is rejected because it "the file is too large". Apparently they have too many bytes, but I don't understand why. How can I make them have less bytes? The avatar I have at the moment was too large, so I just edited it, turning it black and white, then negative. I added the text myself, as well. The problem is, most of the avatars I have won't look good this way, or just won't show up well. Besides this or making the image smaller, is there anything I can do?

You could reduce the quality a bit when you save it... Or save it in a different format.

Saving it as a .gif as opposed to a JPEG will help reduce the file size; though of course you'll lose quite a lot of quality. ^_^" But maybe a .png would work better. See how it goes.

A normal GIF looks better than a low quality JPEG though- at least in my experience.

I figured out that one of my editing programs can compress images so that the quality is kept almost exactly the same, but the bytes it takes up are much less. The avatar I have now is the one I was trying to get to work, so I'm set now! I feel so silly. Thanks for the help anyway, everyone!

You're welcome. ^_^ Glad you got your avatar to work.

And I agree, Shao; sometimes a .gif can look better than a really low-quality JPEG.

Don't use PNGs unless they don't have any transparency in them. Internet Explorer 6 and below don't support PNGs so the transparency becomes this ugly gray/peach/brown mess that is just nasty to see. Personally I say stick with gif, since usually avatars are so small that any loss in quality compared to jpeg isn't noticiable.

For anime-based avatars, the color limitation isn't really noticeable with GIFs, but for more photographic avatars it can be really noticeable.

I'd suggest playing around with the jpeg compression levels for those.

Don't use PNGs unless they don't have any transparency in them. Internet Explorer 6 and below don't support PNGs so the transparency becomes this ugly gray/peach/brown mess that is just nasty to see. Personally I say stick with gif, since usually avatars are so small that any loss in quality compared to jpeg isn't noticiable.

Wow. I didn't know that. Good information to know, so thanks for that. I'll keep that in mind for the future when I'm working with PNGs.