Has Sean or someone done a how to tutorial on pictures (creating images)

[Livermore-Dad]

inside pictures that work well?

I've been trying but many end up with  bright white background and that doesn't work well. Or Ill try to resize and get a lot of noise outside the actual image.

Wondered what the best practice is to get good rendering images/movies?

Thanks
tory

[Gilrock]

Learn to use Gimp or Photoshop.

[thevikester]

You can do a 30 day free trial on Photoshop Elements 14, or Elements Premiere 14,  which is what I just did last week...and removing the background is pretty intuitive, (but I watched a video on youtube) and within 15 minutes, I was removing backgrounds...I'll probably even purchase one of these fine softwares...69 and 99 dollars respectively.

[Gilrock]

If you have a low resolution display element nothing will look good unless you draw it yourself.

[aERonAUtical96]

Use GIMP... free and powerful enough for average user.

As Gil said, unless you have a good resolution (i.e. a lot of pixels rows) most images won't show up good.  I have a 16x60 tree and any image I tried to use didn't show up well.  What I ended up doing was to use GIMP to scale the image to my resolution of my tree.  The image will be blurry, but it is enough to see the outlines.  Then create a new layer and draw pixel by pixel with the pencil tool by tracing the blurred original image.  When you export, ensure you disable the original image layer.  When my drawn images appear on my tree, they are still a little blurry, but are recognizable.  I will probably need to go to a 32x60 to get a better resolution, but not sure I'm ready to do that yet.

The other suggestion I have... my images where 16x60 or something like that... I used the entire 16 pixels wide.  If you can get away with using 50% of your width, maybe 75%, then I would suggest that.  I created an Olaf image for animated mouth.  He was "mostly" recognizable, but he was spread across the tree.  I think it would look better if there was more room on the sides.

Here are two examples of what I drew by hand... Olaf and a character for when the "All I want for christmas is my 2 front teeth" song comes on.


EDIT:  after posting this... I now see that one of the images was 22x37... not sure why I did that   I think maybe it was because I was having it in motion whereas Olaf is stationary singing.

[Gilrock]

There is another thing I do to make images look better.  I have a 12x50 tree so I take images that are larger and then resize them to a height of 50 and then I scroll them sideways across the tree and they look pretty nice.

[thevikester]

There is another thing I do to make images look better.  I have a 12x50 tree so I take images that are larger and then resize them to a height of 50 and then I scroll them sideways across the tree and they look pretty nice.

So when you scroll them across...what are you using for width?  My tree is 32 x 82...but I like the idea of left or right scroll, could probably get away with going 60 wide that way...

[Gilrock]

I use whatever width the image turns out to be when I scale the height down to 50.