Making Avatar with Photoshop

S

stupidgringo

100+ Posts
I'm trying to make a very basic avatar for another site I post to. Nothing fancy - just digital photo cropped and reduced.

The board requires the pic to be 80 x 80 dpi and 6k or less. I'm using Photoshop 7 for Mac, and I can't get it any smaller than about 19k. I'm saving it at the lowest quality - even reducing quality before cropping, then reducing quality (file size) again, and it won't get any smaller.

How can I do this?

Thanks.

And, no, it's not a porn site...
 
Use JPEG. GIFs or PNGs (and especially BMPs, although I don't think many boards allow those) are going to be larger than JPEG.
 
The pixel dimensions are 72 ppi, and the size limit is 80 x 80 pixels.

I'm sure reducing ppi would reduce file size, but wouldn't quality also suffer. The quality is already pretty poor.

I think this has got to be a photoshop issue because other users on the board are creating avatars without this problem using other software. Is there some type of extra data that PS saves in a file that contributes to its size? I have found nothing in the help files.

Thanks again.
 
What bit depth, i.e., how many colors are you using?
Photoshop used to (I don't have it in front of me right now) allow you to save without preview or file resource info. Do that.
Are you sure you're saving just a flat .jpg file?
 
I think pmg is on to something - I played with two pictures, and at 80x80 pixels the biggest I could make them with no compression and 72 dpi was 7k.

Maybe you can post your image here and we can all take a crack at it.
 
Against my better judgement, here is the a link to the file: Make this an Avatar, please

The picture is already square, but needs to be reduced to 80 x 80 pixels. Must be less than 6k, preferably 72 ppi. It is currently RGB color.

On another copy of the file, I reduced to 256 colors, and got rid of the preview. After those changes, Photoshop indicated it was a 5k file. My Mac, however, told me (file info) that it was 24k on disk. I tried to upload it (to the other discussion board), but it was rejected for being too large...

Thanks for your help.
 
I figured it out... "Save for Web", instead of "Save As"... Apparently save for web eliminates all the etra bs.

Blacklab, if you're bored and still want to shrink my picture, here's a new link.

Thanks for your help.
 
1978 bytes. I don't expect to win, but at least I'll be first.

avatar.jpg
 
I got bored fishing and decided to be a pirate in Redfish Bay. I gave up - it' s no fun these days, what with cell phones to call the cops with. It was fun for a moment, initially, especially the look on the guys face when I pulled up alongside his Majek, jumped in and said "Ahoy, matey, I'll be havin' that Daiwa, a cooler of beer, and that nice Cabela's shirt yer wearin' !"

But trying to scuttle his boat in 2 feet of water was no small feat.
 
All "save for web" does is remove the ICC profile. That's usually only a couple of kilobytes. Normally you want to embed an ICC profile in an image. That tends to result in more accurate color reproduction on display devices. Well, you also also get a bit more control over how much or how little compression you use. You may not be able to use as much compression with "save as" because they don't allow you to preview the image before you save it.

The ppi means nothing for digital displays. You can have it at 72 or 3000, you will still end up with an 80 pixel x 80 pixel JPEG image. That won't change how much or how little it compresses. As long as you aren't printing images, you can completely ignore ppi.


pmg, all JPEG images have a color depth of 8 bits per channel at either 3 channels (RGB) or 4 channels (CMYK). It's not like a GIF where you can reduce a file to only 16 colors.
 
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