Moving Avatars - A Quick "How To" - and a Challenge

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VinceS
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Posts: 70
Joined: 19 Mar 2012, 21:54
Location: Newcastle

Yep, couldn't help but be intrigued by Sam's Avatar (if anyone else has done it I haven't seen them) - always like to see someone think outside the square so, when my Cordon's struck a perfect pose for my camera I figured I would see how this is done. Soon found out they are called animated GIF's. Now that I have worked it out the instructions are below and throw out the challenge to any AFF'rs to have a go too and see what you can come up with.

The "all you need to know" is get your pics and go here: http://www.gickr.com/upload_files" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false; - you will have to mess with settings, all two of 'em! What you currently need for AFF is 120 pixels wide and less than 14.65kB. The filesize turned out to be the issue for me, a bit of experimentation and setting a custom width to 95 did the trick. The gickr gif generator will resize your files if you don't want to do it, only takes longer to upload if you give it bigger ones.

Right, the above will do it, but of course the hazard is "sh..t in, sh..t out" - so now to the "tips" section. Part art and part science, but not much of either required so anyone can do it. The two main jobs are to a) get the pictures aligned and b) put them in the best format (256 colour .png with transparency turned on).

You will need some kind of picture editing software, lot's around that will do this stuff, I use Corel PaintShop Pro X4 but I doubt it matters much.

In short this is to align your photos and crop them in the correct ratio (ie a square if you can, but not important), but keep them big. The art is to slightly rotate, zoom / whatever so that the pics flow. Of course I was just looking for animation of the heads so the trick was to align the feet on the perch and everything else fell into place. With ability to tab between the two pics you can easily call one the reference and keep fiddling the other until it works nicely. So this is where its at now (except of course my actual images are much bigger than I can post here):
RedCheekedCordonBleu-1.jpg
RedCheekedCordonBleu-2.jpg
If you look closely I already made a mistake, aligned the top branch up when cropping, not the bottom one! But easily fixed later.

Next bit is the painstaking work to trim them. Basically just crop out everything you don't need on one of the pics. I had intended to have a bit more bottom branch and bird showing but the final piece to get inside the filesize limit I kept cropping a bit more, so this is what is left of one of the feed images:
RedCheekedCordonBleu-1a.jpg
With the other image I did actually do the painstaking trim thing then figured out it wasn't necessary, as long as you start with the pic where the body is smallest. When it has been trimmed use a "magic selector" tool to copy all the white out and paste it in another layer on the other picture. Then just delete the part of this white "mask" so the moving piece of the pic is not blotted out by it, then you only have to crop the moving piece. Plus, as a bonus the rest of the pic is now in perfect alignment.

Now you need to get the format right. What works is to apply a "small defect" smoothing tool then reduce colours to 256. Then turn transparency on and set it to current background colour, ie white and save them as .png files (or .gif is fine too). That's all you need to do to go create the animated .gif file, but I found it helpful to shrink the files to near size so the uploads happened really quickly. Didn't matter what size original I gave it a given pair of pics always produced the same size animated .gif file.

In case I go change the avatar in the future (always a possibility!) this is what it looks like now:
Vince-Cordon_Bleu.gif
I tried "fast", but it is a bit crazy! This is "normal" speed.

So good luck with it, let's see what other creative avatars people can come up with, should anyone be so inclined.........
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Some days are Diamonds some days are Zebs. Sometimes the coccidiosis won't leave me alone. Sometimes a cold wind blows a chill in my Gouldians. But any day with my finches is a day without stones.
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