Carry On Doctor icons (Part One)

[thisbluespirit]

A sort of epic post of insanity, really. I just thought that Carry On Doctor would be fun to practice icon-making with... two or so weeks later, and 188 icons down the line, here's a post. Um. Yes. It's not my favourite of the series by a long chalk, but definitely iconic in all senses of the word.

For the DW majority here: icons of Peter Butterworth (the Monk), Bernard Bresslaw (what an Ice Warrior looks like underneath), Joan Sims (Katryca), Julian Holloway (Survival) and Peter Gilmore (Frontios). Also Peter Jones (the voice of the Hitchhiker's Guide). But mainly the usual suspects.

I still have an issue with the basic quality of the images (causes: Me? Software? One or the other, since any image has the same problem, regardless.) However, I think I managed some prettiness.



If anyone does want any, go ahead. Any comments are much appreciated. As is obvious, I'm all new to icon-making.

Comments

[thisbluespirit]

I try not to, but i did wonder about that, because once I save it in the computer programme it's a Serif file (goodness only knows what that does) and will only save in another file as an export. So then I export it as a jpeg and crop it in my basic software (which is better at that, and also doesn't lose the quality so much.) I'll have to have a play with that. What sort of file types should I be looking for? (If I don't have them, I'll just experiment, but I knew that jpeg was potentially problematic, but not which file type is better.)

Thanks. :-)

[pedanther]

The proprietory format of many image editing programs is lossless, for obvious reasons (Photoshop PSD, for instance); but of course that's no use if you don't have the program. I haven't found anything yet that will tell me if Serif format is.

Off the top of my head, TIF and 24-bit PNG are good lossless file formats. (8-bit PNG is a lot like GIF: can perfectly reproduce a simple picture with fewer than 256 colours, but has trouble with photographs.) (Which reminds me that for your icons that are just text on a non-photographic background, you might consider doing them as GIFs; they're likely to come out neater that way than as JPG.)

If you do find that you're stuck with JPG, there should be an image quality option when you export, with a slider usually from 0 to 100. If you push it up to 100, you minimise the loss of quality (with the trade-off that the file size is larger).

What software are you using to crop the image?

[thisbluespirit]

Thanks. That is very helpful - I'll see what happens next time I get the urge to make obscure and slightly rubbish icons... (Heh.)

And I'm using MGM Photosuite III to crop the image - it came with my digital camera, but it seems much better at doing that precisely and with less loss of quality than Serif. Odd, but hey...

:-)