Profile Portraits Guide

This Profile Portraits Guide is re-used/re-shaped with permission from its author Daniel Newton, a Mod at AnimeVice.com

With profile images we want to avoid things like full body shots and images where the character or person is disappearing into the distance. Depending on the image, sometimes a character or person's face isn't even visible when that image becomes an icon.

Backup your work

We strongly recommend that you backup your contributions to this site so that your valuable work is not lost to unforeseen technical mishaps.

Cropping the Image

Dimensions: 300 x 450 (position the face within the top 300 x 300 pixels)

Format: PNG (small icons look horrible in JPG format)

Preferred Sources: high resolution photos, high quality screen captures

Do Not Use: transparent PNG or GIF, vector trace, fan art, old pictures. Try to find the most recent picture of the person or character.

Uploading/Naming/Applying

When uploading an image please make sure that the file name will make it easy to search for. Keep it simple. Use the character or person’s name. Use numbering if there are multiple images for the same character/person etc.
If there is more than one image for a person or character, create a gallery page and add them all there.

Here are some examples using these guidelines. The top row shows the full portrait and this is how it will display on its character/person page. The bottom two rows shows how the image will appear in icon form elsewhere on the site.

Castiel (Supernatural)	The Governor (The Walking Dead)	Xena (Xena: Warrior Princess)

As you can see, the images are consistent. This format should work for 90% of the people and characters, with the exceptions being things like monsters and other non-humanoid characters, for those we can just use 300 x 300 images.

Tutorial

For those of you having trouble re-sizing and cropping images, here's a tutorial to hopefully make things a little easier. This tutorial uses Paint.NET, a free image editor for Windows (sorry Mac/Linux users) though if you use Adobe Photoshop this guide may still be helpful.

This tutorial will show you how to create profile portraits.

Tools

Paint.NET (download for free here)

Materials

Template Image (download here)

Character/Person Image. For this tutorial I used this image of Eddard Stark from Game of Thrones.

Creating the Portrait

1. Launch Paint.NET and open the template image.

2. Drag and drop your character image onto the template, pick the Add layer option.

3. Go to the Layers box and move the image layer below the template layer.

4. Optional: Zoom Out to make re-sizing easier, especially with large images.

5. Go to Tools and select the Move Selected Pixels tool (the blue cursor icon). -- You should now see a black outline of your image, if you can't see it, move the image around or zoom out more.

6. Important: Hold down the Shift Key on your keyboard (this maintains the aspect ratio) and re-size the image by dragging the corner points. Move the image and re-size until the head is inside the top square section of the template. -- Generally you want to keep the head inside that square, the top of the head touching the top and the chin touching the bottom. Don't worry if some hair goes outside the template, focus on the face and head.

7. Hit the Enter Key on your keyboard when you're done.

8. Go to the Layers box. Delete the template layer.

9. Go to Image in the toolbar and select Canvas Size, change the width to 300 pixels and height to 450 pixels. Make sure the Anchor is Top Left. -- Your image should now be cropped to the correct size, if something went wrong, you can undo edits using the History box.

10. Done? Go to File, Save As, change the type to PNG and click Save. Leave settings on Auto-detect and click OK.

Well Done!

Ta-da! You should now have a nice new portrait image for a character or person page. If so, pat yourself on the back. If not... start again and read each step carefully.