From the Posting Policies: 6) Signatures can consist of multiple images which should be kept to a total size of under 85k and max dimensions of W:500 x H:150 pixels. Signatures which fall outside of these boundaries and cause malformations of the forum structure will be immediately removed. As always, Moderators have full authority to remove any signature.

We've been pretty lenient on sig sizes lately, but some of them are getting out of control. We let *most* of the ones near 90-95kb squeak by. 180kb+ are completely unacceptable and will be removed.

RENAMING THE FILE EXTENSION FROM *.BMP TO *.JPG DOES NOT ACTUALLY CHANGE THE FILE ITSELF!

Please go to somewhere like CNet.com (http://download.com.com/3150-2192-0.html) and download a image file editor and compress your sigs down to a manageable size. Most people's sigs are under the sig limit, but if you save them in high-rez, 24-bit high color bmps, they will be over the limit.

My administrative rant for the day. Thank you.

Reduce the picture from .bmp or .jpg to .gif and hugely reduce the size of the file. You will hardly notice any diff, and optomize it if you can figure out how.

Oh, also, any size reduction and special effects like the button effect, do before you change to .gif. After you do all that, you reduce the colors from 16 million to 256 and then rename it whatever.gif.

Whoever invents a program that automatically analyses and optimally compresses a signature pic with the touch of one big friendly button is going to be very rich :)

How, exactly, does one optimize a jpg file?

I'm familiar with making them physically small, and chaning formats...optimizing is a buzzword I hear often enough.

JPEG's output "resolution" has a much finer control for resampling. It's what is known as a "lossy" format - meaning, it throws away redudant or unnecessary data while maintaining nearly the same image quality.

An image that is "lossless" (meaning, no data has been thrown away) can be, for example, 3 MB. However the same image, when saved as a JPEG and "optimized" (or the quality is lowered and therefore, data is thrown out) can be 50 kb. The two images, however, will look virtually the same.

The amount of acceptable looking lossy depends on the number of colors in the image - a grayscale image can be optimized far more than a high multiple color image (so don't expect the same results with each image).

One of the easiest applications to use to apply image optimization is Photoshop and the "Save for web" option in the File menu. You will want to select the JPEG export option, turn off Progressive (this adds more information to the file and therefore, bloats the file size), check on the "Optimized" check box and then move the Quality slider up and down. You will see in the preview window your image reduce and increase quality. Play with it until it the lowest quality you find acceptable that is within the file size limitation you want (the file size that will be generated with the current settings is displayed beneath the image in the lower left hand corner).

<blockquote><strong><em>Quote:</em></strong><hr>Whoever invents a program that automatically analyses and optimally compresses a signature pic with the touch of one big friendly button is going to be very rich[/quote]
Big...Friendly...well sorta...BUTTON! (http://www.exploiter.org/daox/)

Sorry couldn't help it :)

Heheheh... that's exactly the button I was thinking of :)

I use the <a href="http://www.gimp.org/" target="top">Gimp</a>. It's easy. It's powerfull. It's FREE! It's way better than many of the other free solutions out there, and does a great job converting images to other formats.


Only drawbacks are, it's a little buggy and it's tough to learn. You have to get used to "right-clicking" on the image a lot.

=)

didn't realise mine was as bad as it was in here...sorry bout that.
it doesn't show up like that else where tho *shrugs*
thanks for the info on shrinkage too :)