um… you can … it just really agervating and turns out really crappy. but it is possible because paint shows you how big it really is so you save it the way you want it to look in Paint then no worries… but I do reccomend PhotoShop
Add: Sorry Liquor … I didn’t know you already said the same thing
ya i do realize this thread getting really off-topic but i will allow it this time since this thread is obsolete now that i have a sticky post on future releases, and good’ol doug still hasn’t changed his avatar
I actually used a website to resize my image. It lost a little of its sharpness, but otherwise it worked fine. I’d assume the website would work regardless of operating system, and it’d be good for those of you who never bother with such things except to make the occasional avatar.
Note it only resizes the image, keeping the same proportion, and doesn’t crop the image (taking parts out that were there before).
The paint stretch function is really crappy. After messing with it for a while today, I wouldn’t recommend it. The cropping works fine without hurting the quality though, if you happen to have a lot of “filler” surrounding the important part of the picture.
Well, when you enlarge an image you shouldn’t lose sharpness so much as it becoming “blockier” due to the size increase without a corresponding resolution increase. Shrinking the image should actually improve the visual quality. At the very least, there shouldn’t be a loss in quality. For my particular pic, shrinking it resulted in a loss of some of the sharpness, or perhaps contrast, due to a quirk of the program. Maybe it has more to do with the compression involved in .jpeg’s and .gif’s (used as the originals you modify) rather than the particular program you use.
Perhaps I misspoke. What I was imagining wasn’t so much using a program to physically shrink an image, but rather simple magnification/demagnification (to avoid technical issues and quirks unique to different programs). Imagine one of those blocky paintings, where when you stand up close you see all the individual blocks, or “pixels” that compose it. Then you step back, and you begin to see the picture as a whole. Step back far enough way, and you can’t even tell that the picture was made of “pixels” that big. I would say that the visual quality improved as you stepped back. When games can run at several resolutions, but all it does it resize the window, I almost never play at full-screen, because I think the visual quality is too poor. I’d rather the window be smaller and the graphics more crisp.
I was trying to relate that to physically shrinking images.
To work with pictures from the net or from your digitalcamera i use ACDSEE Partner Eedition, i will use it to make me an avatar sometime in the future, but it is useful and it is free.