CAA: Christian Anime Alliance

I was working on an animation for my new avatar, and I had finished the whole thing. It looked really cool, too...I was so surprised that nothing had gone wrong yet, as the last five avatars I have attempted all have something terribly wrong with them. And then I found out...I couldn't use jpeg, and gif was not an option. I'm stuck, so I just posted the miserable thing up anyway...can anyone help me? (by the way, I use photoshop 7.0 and imageready)

Funny how no one replied to this thread, although it has been up for quite some time...suggestions, anyone?

..looks good?

Ha. Thanks. ^^
Not the solution to my problem...even better. Someone in the world actually cares that I posted a thread!
I'm a needy person...too needy...

i think to use an avatar, it has to be a bit-map file, can you save your pic as a bit-map file?

It says that bmp. doesn't support animation.

GIF files work sometime to. try that.

I'll try it...one more time...*is sleepy*

Here's a quick lesson in image file formats.

JPG only supports still images (in fact the only widely supported animated image format for the web, esp. for avatars, is GIF).

JPG, BMP, PNG, etc. they all support alike 16million colors (or there abouts), where as GIF only supports 256, however it can be 256 out of the same 16million that JPG supports.

Most likely you've got your image either with an Alpha channel (partial transparency) on the layers, GIF only supports 1 color of the 256 for full transparency.


IF it's the Alpha issue you'll need to look at a different way of doing things, or maybe you'll just need to threshold your Alpha channel (while the GIMP will do this quite easily, most people give me blank stares when I mention this... someone wise in the ways of your software will have to post how). Basically it just means that you'll have to decide how transparent is fully transparent and the rest is not.

If it's the color issue then you need to convert your image over to an Indexed format and most likely without any dithering. Depending on how much color is in your animation you may not get the best results by letting the computer pick the colors.... and be warned that not every computer sees the colors the same way, though I'm sure that's improved in the last few years (there are Web based color pallettes that are supposed to support as many different systems as possible.

Anyway, hope that helped rather than got you confused.

Thanks! That makes things much clearer. Although I don't completely understand everything you're saying, I know enough to figure out what I need to do and can grasp the concept. My gratitude...much thanks! *is happy again*