Hey, I have been looking around and discovered that almost everyone has a really cool avatar. But whenever I try to make my own the file is either way to big, and when I make the file the right size the image looks really crappy.

My question is: how do you make avatars the right size without destroying the image?

That's easy. you need a good image editing progam... one where you can accurately change it to the right size without crunching down the image too much. A good progam shouldn't cause problems with images that progams such as MSPaint could cause. Such as grainy, too-pixelly crunched images of a low-res quality.

A good progam should not only have the opition to resize in terms of inches or CM, but also in pixels. so if you see something like a dropdown menu on the resizing menu within a progam that lists all of those opitions, you should always go for the one that says pixels.

So if a site like DD says it needs to be 100x100 pixels, then you should resize it that way.

Another good tip in avatar-making is to not have your picture that you resize be the sort that's Too detailed. If the image holds plenty of extra details when it's at a large size, then those details are going to be competely lost when resized to such a small image... and it won't look as impressive anymore. If you really want to use that spefic image, then it's better to just crop it if you want to focus on a spefic detail of that image. Then you can adjust to the proper size to your liking.

I hope those tips helped-- coming from somebody who likes making her own avatars. ^^;;

oh, I forgot to talk about the file size. Sites like DD here also have restrictions on that... so to check if the file size is too large, then you should go to the folder that your avatar's in... and then right click on it. You should go to properites then, and check how large it is.

DD only accepts file sizes under 37kb or so for avatars... and if you want to keep that 100x100 but want to reduce the file size.. you should adjust the image so that you take out all the unnesscary colors. you could make it so that you save it as an "web image"... so that it only has a limited color palette, but without taking too much color out of your image. That's one way to cut down on the file size.

what programs would you recommend?

for .gif avatars, which I like to use a lot, I use the Jasc Animation progam.

For non-animated images, I use photoshop. However of course not everyone can have photoshop so again, here's some freeware ones I've used in the past:

http://www.tucows.com/preview/517772 Paint.net-- basically MSpaint on steriods. It's way better than the regular MS-paint. it has gradients, you can draw in it, etc... and best of all, you can resize your images any way you like.

http://www.tucows.com/preview/400653 Graphics Gale. Used this a lot when I was an pixel artist/Digtal Doll creator. Very useful, and resizes images without it becoming too pixelly and or crunching your images. And you don't even have to be an pixel/sprite/digtal doll creator to enjoy this progam. plenty of my other friends enjoyed this progam too....

And I happened to find this one too... http://www.tucows.com/preview/357312 An progam solely for avatar-resizing... I guess this one would be best if you didn't want a muliti-purpose progam. =P

Thank you :D
cant wait to get experimenting

I made the graphic just fine correct size, etc but I cannot get to button to just upload

Eh...
At least yours looks better than all of my attempts.