1_million_words | Keeping Things Looking Right

When

kaige68 first asked for volunteers and when I first volunteered to write a post about graphic making I had no idea what I would talk about and then I thought why not start with something basic. That way if someone is looking to start making graphics, especially icons, it’s a place to start.

My sister is the one who helped me out and showed me the ropes when I first started making graphics, and still does when I’m a bit confused about something, and one of the first things that she said was proportion, proportion, proportion. You always want to remember to keep your image proportioned correctly. So that will mean there are times when the picture/screencap that you want to use just might not end up working for you. That happens with me quite a bit when making icons since the end result is a square (100x100 is the size of an icon). Tucked under the cut is an example of what I'm talking about.

Wanted to use this picture for an icon with the theme being 'strike a pose'

Since the original size is 750 (height) and 500 (width) I knew the largest I could crop it would be a 500x500 to keep the proportions correct and this is what it would look like:

Looks good but not what I wanted to fit the theme. The only way to keep the whole image would be to mess with the proportions and this would be the end result:

As you can see with this it would work with the theme of the icon but Rodney is a bit squished and doesn't look right.

Ended up not using this picture and found another that when I cropped and resized Rodney still looked like Rodney. Can't post it here since it's part of a 20in20 set that I'm currently working on and hope to have finished and posted soon.

What I always do when cropping is to figure out either how tall or how wide I want something and go back and adjust to make sure that the length and width are both the same. Once I have the size adjusted move the box around to the area that I want to work with, crop the picture/screencap and resize to the 100x100 for icons. When resizing you want to make sure that you have checked off the lock aspect ratio that way you know you'll keep the correct proportions. There are times when I'll go back and adjust the size to make sure that when I crop I'm getting all of the image that I want. If I change the length I go and adjust the width to match and vice versa. It's a little trick that I found that makes it easier when cropping.

So what tricks do you have when cropping and resizing?

Hopefully this was a bit helpful. Any questions fire away!