Userbars

[Fatalcrash]

I was looking at the uberbar floating around, and I have to say I'm impressed by the sharpness of the Keith used for it. Changing the images to jpg really hurts the quality of the character faces, animating it like in my sig makes it even worse.

[Shade]

These really don't belong here- but really I dont think they fit anywhere else so I'll let em stay- just hopefully people wont make a habit of putting stuff like this on here.

i like the bars. im glad he showed me these. actually, in my opinion you should thank him.
this should become a sticky so newbies can find this post too.
by the way, i saw bigger versions of these. can you PM me the link lol

No, these can go here. It's art, this is where they should go.
Good work, btw. I like the userbars. They look nice.

Tom himself likes them! youve got to keep these!

We also need shipping bars.

Relationship bar. Romantic pairings a fan wants to see, in userbar form. Makes your 'allegiances' known.

yeah that is a long list.. lol.. what about, main character pairs only? like trace/flora, keith/natani or laura, you know.. basic characters.

[Fabius Defessus]

These really don't belong here- but really I dont think they fit anywhere else so I'll let em stay- just hopefully people wont make a habit of putting stuff like this on here.

i like the bars. im glad he showed me these. actually, in my opinion you should thank him.

Why did you use that quote?

by the way, i saw bigger versions of these. can you PM me the link lol

He just finished talking about it.

[Shade]

he did? doh. k i'll have a look i just saw this topic

[Sage]

I was looking at the uberbar floating around, and I have to say I'm impressed by the sharpness of the Keith used for it. Changing the images to jpg really hurts the quality of the character faces, animating it like in my sig makes it even worse.

Changing the images to a jpg doesnt hurt the quality at all unless you are setting the JPG quality reallllllly low.

And you still havent made a Karen User bar- is Sage going to have to internet slap someone?

[Kinuki]

Does anyone have a tut on how to make these? I'd like to make a few, but I dunno how. Or the font, for that matter.

[avwolf]

I was looking at the uberbar floating around, and I have to say I'm impressed by the sharpness of the Keith used for it. Changing the images to jpg really hurts the quality of the character faces, animating it like in my sig makes it even worse.

Changing the images to a jpg doesnt hurt the quality at all unless you are setting the JPG quality reallllllly low.

Unless you're using magical JPEGs beyond the ken of Computer Science, that's incorrect, Sage. JPEG files by their very definition are lossy. In fact, each time you save them, even at maximal quality, will involve some loss to the image. That's the nature of the format.

The userbars exhibit further quality loss because the image itself isn't really a good fit for JPEGs. Simple colors with a very sudden transition don't really work well, so the dithering that JPEG encoding produces makes the characters look "fuzzy" against the background.

I'm quite confused by your comment here...I know that you know better than that.

Incidentally, I'll just add that they look terrific, Fatalcrash. Sure, they're sampled content, but they're really well assembled. No requests from me, though. Looks like you've got enough to keep you busy.

[Shade]

except for the god avatar i have all my images are JPG and with Gimp 2.2 i dont have to make them any more then what they are.

like these two:

[Fatalcrash]

I was looking at the uberbar floating around, and I have to say I'm impressed by the sharpness of the Keith used for it. Changing the images to jpg really hurts the quality of the character faces, animating it like in my sig makes it even worse.

Changing the images to a jpg doesnt hurt the quality at all unless you are setting the JPG quality reallllllly low.

Unless you're using magical JPEGs beyond the ken of Computer Science, that's incorrect, Sage. JPEG files by their very definition are lossy. In fact, each time you save them, even at maximal quality, will involve some loss to the image. That's the nature of the format.

The userbars exhibit further quality loss because the image itself isn't really a good fit for JPEGs. Simple colors with a very sudden transition don't really work well, so the dithering that JPEG encoding produces makes the characters look "fuzzy" against the background.

I'm quite confused by your comment here...I know that you know better than that.

Incidentally, I'll just add that they look terrific, Fatalcrash. Sure, they're sampled content, but they're really well assembled. No requests from me, though. Looks like you've got enough to keep you busy.

Hah, tell me about it. I just took a job, so now I'm even busier than before.

Sage does seem different lately, doesn't he. I probably shouldn't be typing as though he can't read my words.

[avwolf]

Hah, tell me about it. I just took a job, so now I'm even busier than before.

Whoo. Well, I hope the job treats you well. Maybe you're going to have to take on an apprentice to make up all these bars everybody wants.

Sage does seem different lately, doesn't he. I probably shouldn't be typing as though he can't read my words.

I think he's been really busy lately. For what it's worth, I know what he was trying to say -- he was referring to simple perceptive quality, rather than absolute quality (which was what I was talking about), and he forgot to take into account the differences between the userbars, which aren't suited to JPEG, and the comic, which is (largely because of Tom's gradient-laced backgrounds, but I digress).

How long, on average, does it take you to put one of these together? I imagine most of the time spent is in finding the right image to use, closely followed by the time to clean it up, but that's just guesswork on my part.

[Sage]

Hah, tell me about it. I just took a job, so now I'm even busier than before.

Whoo. Well, I hope the job treats you well. Maybe you're going to have to take on an apprentice to make up all these bars everybody wants.

Sage does seem different lately, doesn't he. I probably shouldn't be typing as though he can't read my words.

I think he's been really busy lately. For what it's worth, I know what he was trying to say -- he was referring to simple perceptive quality, rather than absolute quality (which was what I was talking about), and he forgot to take into account the differences between the userbars, which aren't suited to JPEG, and the comic, which is (largely because of Tom's gradient-laced backgrounds, but I digress).

How long, on average, does it take you to put one of these together? I imagine most of the time spent is in finding the right image to use, closely followed by the time to clean it up, but that's just guesswork on my part.

Theres a story about this- A Professor and a Waitress were in a car, they drove past a heard of sheep that had no wool. The waitress said "Those sheep have been shorn." And the professor said "Not exactly, we know they have been shorn on this side but we don't know if they have on the other since we cannot see their other side."

The waitress' statement was based on a global truth since people do not only shave one side of the sheep, while the professors was simply to stroke his own ego.

Yes- technically no matter what you will loose some quality by making something a JPG. But the question is do you see all the tiny bits of data or do you see a picture? If you don't see a change in the picture basically you can say there is no loss in quality. It isn't like grading a diamond.

But there is a reason we still use JPG. You can get a good amount of quality from a JPG more easily and with a smaller file size than you can with a GIF (which often screws up colors and blending) and a PNG which often either does the same or doubles the file size to reduce the visibility of it all.

If you really want to get technical we can go ahead and start talking about using Vector formats by using flash to view them on the site, but then we would need to create it all in vectors or would have to convert it all to vectors- and converting color to vector is a pain unless there is some special program out there now that I havent heard of.

And why is there still no Karen!?

[INH the Arctic Tigerboy]

We all have to stoke our egos occasionally.

[Sage]

We all have to stoke our egos occasionally.

That is true- however- that doesnt excuse the lack of Karen...

[avwolf]

Oh ho, sir, you besmirch my honor. I wrote up an insightful post to argue my point, but I decided against hijacking this thread further. Then I realized I would be best off to simply put Photoshop where my mouth is. I'll do your Karen for you. Then I can see how right or wrong I am about this subject.

Now, unfortunately, this happens to be a very busy weekend for me (I've got family graduating tomorrow), so I don't know if I'll have time to get anything together until Sunday. If you want to save me some serious time and trouble and pick out a good shot of Karen to use, please, feel free.

Fatalcrash, as these are your assemblages, and I do not wish to step on your toes here, if you don't want the challenge to take this form, just let me know.

[Shade]

Sage seems differently lately? I suppose so. Although, Nobody Really has the ability to take their time juring a post before they go onto something more important.