Help needed with Avatars in Player Profile

[Onthebeach]

Hi, can anyone tell me how to successfully change the avatar? I know it is pic20000.png but I am not able to change it. I am using Photoshop, I opened the PNG file (I have never used these and it does not have any layers that I can find) and pasted in my preferred image (Sterling Hayden as Col. Jack Ripper) rather than the generic silhouette. It sort of works but half of the new face is missing and the generic guy is still there behind Sterling.
Does anyone with more photoshop experience know what I am doing wrong? I'd be most obliged.
many thanks
Kim in Australia

[Ragu]

1. Open 2000.png
2. Bring in Sterling
3. CTRL+T to scale the image to the correct size. Holding shift will constrain it squarely. Hit enter when done.
4. Position it over the first shillouette.
5. On the Sterling layer reduce the opacity temporarily so you can reall make sure it's lined up properley, then boost it back to full layer opacity.
6. Add a mask to the Sterling layer (at the bottom of the layers pallette, looks like a rectangle with a circle in it's center).
7. Paint black on the mask to hide the unwanted pixels.
8. After this is done, CTRL and left click the layer it's self (not the mask), and it will highlight all pixels in the layer (apart from those masked out).
9. On the top menu bar, so to Select-->Modify--->Feather, then feather it by 1 pixel to remove any hard edges from the mask.
10. Turn off the bottom layer visability off (black shollouttes) BEFORE you save the file as 2000.PNG



Also here is an example file (however I forgot to feather it)

http://www.filehosting.org/file/details ... c20000.psd

[Onthebeach]

Hi Ragu,
you are a star! I will try it out - that is a part of Photoshop I have not played with before. May call you again if I get in trouble but hopefully I will be OK.
cheers
Kim

[Onthebeach]

Hi again Ragu,
that file download service did not work, not sure why. My direct e-mail is kimthecdman@techinfo.com.au if you want to try again.
cheers
Kim

[Onthebeach]

Hi Ragu,
sorry, whatever I am doing wrong, those instructions are not working for me.
Help!
Kim

[Anthropoid]

Not perfect; there is a small gray background showing through on the right.



But all I did was this:
1. I copied my avatar from over at Matrix Games (BTW, how do I set up my avatar here on BG forums!?) Into Paint



(note I had already fiddled with that some years ago to resize it for forum avatar size)

2. I found pic20000.png and right-clicked it: then renamed it "pic20000original.png"

3. I saved Dr. Evil's avatar pic into the SRCW/Graphics/Peoples directory as "pic20000.png"

Sure photoshop would make it look better, but for 5 minutes not bad