Garaneno's Page of Graphic Tips :)

Howdy guest, it's Garaneno here, welcome to my page! I was lucky enough to be adopted by _space_freak_. She's enrolled me into the secret neoschool to learn all 'bout making graphics :). And now I'm going to relate some of the stuff I know so you can learn to ... yay learning is fun!!

Ok I'm going to be telling you how I got my banner above on this page, starting from making the banner in paint. I'm going to also be giving you more graphic tips so come back soon to learn more :)

I've used a baby skeith neopet picture, if you want to see all the pics available for each type of neopet then check out MarsFarts pet page enter in the species and colour :)

The pics have been shrunken and compressed to save space :)

Save Paint BMP
So you've made your pic in paint, time to save it as a BMP. Choose file save as and type in a name for the pic, make sure you remember which directory the pic is saved to.

Save BMP as GIF (or JPG)
Ok now this is the tricky bit, you need a graphics program that is better than paint to save the BMP as a GIF (or JPG). I usually use paint shop pro but you may find a cheaper one at download.com. On this page I've used irfanview which is a free program you can download.

You need to use a proper graphics program to get the best quality picture. Saving the pic as a .gif is most common especially when using neopet graphics (as I have done in my banner) but if your pic is or contains photo's then .jpg may be better.

So open up irfanview and loaded up the BMP, now choose file save as and select GIF

Click the options button to get the following window

Make sure your settings are like mine, with best quality choosen and save transparent color check box checked off. Choose Ok then Save.

Make your pic transparent
So you have some bits in your pic that you would like to be transparent? Well check out Xandorra's Place after you've admired her gorgeous dollz, go to the tutorial section, then select the tutorial "Make your doll transparent using Irfan View" and follow her instructions :)

Compress your pic
Ok so you want to enter your picture into the beauty comp but it you get an error that says the file size is > 17K ... oh no! Or maybe you just want to save space, esp since your guild photo gallery can only hold 250Kb worth of pics! You need to compress!

First off if your pic is a BMP save it as a GIF, if you are lucky it will now be less than 17K ...

Oh no it's still too big! Now we have to compress the pic, which may mean you lose the quality of the picture... ok so what you need to do is go to spinwave.com and use the gif cruncher for .gif or the jpeg cruncher for .jpg . Browse to choose your file, then crunch! Choose the one you think is best and has the best filesize, right click the pic and save it.

Oh no none of them look good at a small file size!! Unfortunately you'll have to make the pic physically smaller :( and try crunching again ...

Upload to your guilds photo gallery
Unfortunately you can't upload photo's to guild galleries anymore, neo won't let us :( ... so you'll need you're own web space ... unfortunately free ones are unreliable and the reliable ones you have to pay for ... you'll have to find you're own site sorry I can't help ... I pay for mine with boompeed.com ...

Find the URL
Now right click your new photo and the following window should appear, select properties.

A new window should come up with the following details.

Now you can see the URL :) Now you can go to neopets help page / html guide to find the code to put this picture in your shop or guild. Or use CSSHelp's pet page to use CSS code to put this pic just about anywhere.

Find the URL of your liquid2k.com pic

The pic URL can be found using the following format
http://liquid2k.com/yourusername/yourpic.gif
If you created a folder and put your photo in that folder then your pic URL will be in the following format
http://liquid2k.com/yourusername/yourfolder/yourpic.gif

Now you should have your banner up on your page just as I have my banner up on the top of this page ... if you have any problems then please neomail my mommy :)

paint shop pro (psp)

Most of the graphics I do are made in Paint Shop Pro. Here's a few tips, I'll elaborate on them more soon :) but for now you should check out the psp user group if you signup you get access to loads of free tutorials.

Layers
Ok once you've signed up check out the basic tutorials if you're unfamiliar with psp. Here's a great layer tutorial.

Transparent
Here's a great layer tutorial that teaches you how to make one of the layers transparent. I use this technique to make the transparent white box in my pics.

I'll be expanding these sections one day :)

other links