paint problem

Hi kev,

You're using MS Paint? Well, can you explain what you're doing? Paint only saves to bmp format (which ain't gonna upload to the avatar gallery without first converting it to a jpg or gif, by the way), and bmp is a lossless image format, unlike jpg for instance, so there's really no way for the colors to change unless you explicitly set it to use a low color palette, monochrome palette or some such.

Hi Monger,

It's the first time I've even looked at the paint prog, so what you said was like einstein trying to explain reativity to Bart simpson

OK so far I got an emblem of yorkshire from a net site, cut out the part I wanted and saved it (as a gif file, not by choice it just happened that way)

Opened up paint, clicked on "file" "open" brought the image up and cut it down to the right size and saved it to documents

but the colour is too light. If that doesn't make it clearer, perhaps you could ask me specific questions-- but keep it strictly ABC stuff

lol sorry dude

OK lets see here, some versions of Paint can open gif files (I think the Windos 98 version could) but I don't think any versions of the program will save as gif files. Then again I don't have any Win98 or XP machines around to verify that on.

Please let me know if the new image you saved from Paint is in fact a .bmp file.

The Paint which comes with windows 2000 (which I'm running) won't even open gif files so I can't test what happens when going from gif to bmp in Paint, but one thing though... when you go to save the file make sure the 'Save as type' drop-down list on the the 'Save As' window is set to the highest color palette available. (16-Bit, 24-Bit and 32-Bit should all be just fine)

One other thing is that if you are resizing the image (rather than just cropping it) you could be losing quality there.

But bmp files can't be uploaded to A2K's avatar gallery. If you post the original gif file here maybe someone can modify it & get it into a jpg or gif file for ya so you'll be able to upload it.

Monger I've now got the colour right, but the image started off as a gif file I think, or thats what it said in the file, but after my cropping job it is now a bitma file which as you say wont load up to become my avatar-- I tried it.

But I followed CDK's paint tutorial step by step so what did I do wrong?

If I ever see the guy who charged me £20 for windows 98 for dummies I'll smack him in the mouth with it.

Go back to the paint program, select the .bmp and follow monger steps, but save it as a gif.
jpg files are only for photo quality while gif files are for cartoon, drawing type files -

Thanks Monger and Ceili

There might be hope for me yet.

Moved to computers (cause it's not a forum help issue).

Monger/Ceili/ anyone else,

Does that mean Ceili that if I do the process again and do a jpg file that it will be a better quality? Don't laugh this means nothing to me.

No, most likely not.

There be quite a few diferences between bmp, gif & jpg. Some basics... The type of qraphics which usually compress to smaller filesizes as gifs are clipart-style line art graphics, graphics with few colors & very small graphics (such as a2k avatars). Photo-type images (at just about any size larger than these avatars) will usually compress to smaller filesizes as jpgs, but jpg compression always knocks off quality, and you'll lose more quality every time you make changes and save again. Gifs, on the other hand, don't have to lose quality, but they use a max of 256 colors (while most other image formats can save billions of colors) so even in small gif images you may lose qulaity. Bmp is a lossless format, or in other words it never loses quality, but bmp filesizes are much larger.

It's a bit tricky, but hopefully that clears some stuff up.


Ceili, are you really able to save as gif from your version of MS Paint?

i find that my version of MS paint ( I am running WIN98 ) will allow me to save and open in all three formats, bitmap saving without quality loss, jpg losing quality and gif losing colour information. If you had an avatar you liked but it had too many colours to be saved as a gif, there are many JPEG compression programs available from the internet. none of the ones I have seen have been freeware, but if its what you want then go for it.

one great freeware program you could use is irfanview. It's an image viewer/browser, but it will also easily convert between bmp, jpg, gif, png & most other popular formats. It'll let you set the level of jpg compression/quality loss if you need to