AstroLad's Screenshot Forum Guide V. 2
By
Altoholic_Monkey,
Posted on: 2005-07-14 24:52 in Player Guides
Nice explanation -- and your avatar really DOES look good. I've been thinking of revamping my avatar for awhile, so I'll probably give it a shot in the next couple days! Thanks for the useful post! 
i just made a forum account and photobucket account 
idk how to work the photobucket. i took a picture of my toon the way i want but how do i put it on my photobucket? ty in advance.
1. Log onto your Photobucket account.
2. You should be taken right to your photo album. There is a menu option for "Add Pictures" and a button called "Choose Picture." Click that button.
3. This will pull down a menu of your hard drive's contents. Select your 80x80 jpeg picture that you have resized and saved on your hard drive, then press "choose."
4. In the "Add Photos" menu, press "Submit."
5. Your photo should now be in your album.
6. Just follow the directions for adding your photo to your CoH forum account and you should be good to go.
Adding a photo to Photobucket is SUPER easy. If you really can't figure it out, I can't help you.
yay got it up! i think it looks pretty good. hard to c kinda but watever. ty for advice astrolad.
Just wanted to say thank for posting this. It helped alot with my meager efforts.
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great post. thanks. it is always nice to find some of those tips for working with photo
Thanks, I hope this helps!
Astrolad -- Thank goodness I finally figured out where I got the great advice for the pics! It came from you and your guide. I read it sometime back and have been using your tips since then! Thank you!
I used your tips for all my character avatars that I posted up on my game tracker site
http://www.citygametracker.com/status.aspx?userid=888
Thanks!
Your screen shots look great- keep up the good work!
Astrolad, i just want to say you have a sexy Avatar.
Sh4rp-
[ QUOTE ]
Astrolad, i just want to say you have a sexy Avatar.
Sh4rp-
[/ QUOTE ]
Um... thanks?
Thanks and good luck!
Even if everything is smaller now It looks really sharp,thanks!
*Updates- I cleaned up some spelling mistakes, grammar and consolidated my posts into one uber guide.
A couple of people have asked me how I got my avatar to look so polished so I thought I would write a guide to help you make your avatar look it's best.
What Ive done is pretty simple and these tips should help you out. I'm a graphic artist and I've got Photoshop handy, but you should be able to do this with any photo editor.
The first thing I did was set my game resolution as high as it could go and max out the pixels under "Options" in City of Heroes. My screen size is 1280 x 1024.
Next, I went indoors (in City Hall actually) to take the screen grab. The light there is completely balanced and your colors won't shift like they will when you're in an outdoor environment. (Plus the floor looks so cool as a background!)
I played around with the camera position and gave myself an overhead camera view and got the camera as close to his face without him "ghosting" him out. Click and hold down your mouse wheel while you move the mouse around to change your view. Roll the mouse wheel to zoom in and out.
Since the face is all I wanted, the rest of the framing didn't matter- I just had to get the camera as close as I could. I made Astro do the "muhhahaha" emote to get him to look up and I hit print screen to capture the image.
Next, I opened my CoH image in Photoshop and made a new canvas with an 80x80 pixel size (the max your avatar can be.) I copied my much larger screen cap into the smaller canvas and moved the picture around to where I wanted it. Because the face was too big for the small canvas, I scaled it down and rotated it to fit.
Then, I just saved it as a jpeg with the maximum image quality.
Ta da! That's all I did.
The big secret is setting CoH to the highest levels and getting your toon to fill up the screen as much as you can.
Now that youve got a picture of your toon that you like enough to share with the rest of the forums, the next step is sticking it in the upper left hand corner of every one of your posts.
After youve saved your picture as described above, youll need two more things.
1. Hosting on the web for your picture.
2. A URL address for your picture on the internet.
Step 1.
To host your photo, I recommend www.photobucket.com. Youll get free hosting for your pictures and enough space per month that everyone on the forums will be able to see your awesome mug shot.
Just register on Photobucket and follow their instructions for uploading your photo. Its a nice, easy interface and is nearly idiot proof.
Step 2.
Once your photo is uploaded, take a look at your album or catalog of your photos. Under each photo are three versions of the address of your picture. Youll need this info so the CoH forums will know where your photo is.
Step 3.
Select the line that has information in the URL line and copy that text. *Make sure you use the URL line and NOT the other two lines. **If you dont know how to copy text, I cant help you. Ask your grand kids.
Step 4.
Log onto the CoH forums and click on the My Home link under the main title info.
Step 5.
You should now see several menus to choose from. (They all look so good ) Find the menu that says Main Configuration. Select the edit link next to the Personal information, email, password, etc. line.
Step 5.
This is where you enter a lot of info about your profile. Scroll on down to last portion of the page. Select the bubble that says URL to your avatar. In the menu space next to that, Paste the address of your picture that you copied in Step 3.
Step 6. Click on Submit.
Step 7. Pat yourself on the back and start posting with confidence. Youre now one of the forum elite that has a screenshot photo avatar.
Other tips to consider:
*Make sure you saved your photo as a .gif, .jpg, or .png. You might not be able to save your photo on Photobucket if its in another format and the forums sure as heck wont take it if it's not.
*Make sure your photo is 80 x 80 PIXELS. Yeah its small, but its very important to use the proper size. Anything larger than that will be resized to fit and may cause a smooshed effect to your image.
*Be sure to copy only the URL info and not any other info from your album. The image source and tag lines wont work on the CoH forums. Other forums may allow those addresses, but CoH wont.