Q&A

[goodbyebird]

Questions & Answers

We had a fair amount of response in the poll, so here is the rumored Q&A post! Any questions you have about graphics, ask away and hopefully someone can help you out. Makers can also make a comment and people can ask them questions specifically - I'll set mine up, feel free to follow that example - and I'll link individual makers as well as question threads in the post when I'm around to edit.

The Request Fest is still open until Sunday evening, so get those requests and fills in.

goodbyebird's question thread
timetobegin's question thread
geckoholic's question thread
hsapiens's question thread
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Who's your most inspirational icon makers?
How do you organize your icon folders?
What are your favorite textures to use?
compressing your icons? (file size too big, smart objects)

Comments

Re: compressing your icons?

[goodbyebird]

When I click to save as png, a box comes up that says @PNG options'. My selection for compression is smallest/slow, interlace is none. And wow, 88kb? Dude.

All your layers are marked with "smart object thumbnail" though, which isn't something I've seen before. How do you resize or add your images in photoshop? Since smart objects retain so much of the image information, that could be what's inflating your file size.

Re: compressing your icons?

[frayadjacent]

Thanks! Yeah I save the same way, but you're right that the problem is the way that I'm adding images. I used to open the original cap in photoshop and crop/edit from there, but lately I've been dragging and dropping the cap into a 200x200 canvas and moving it around and resizing. I new that all the image info outside the bounds of the canvas were retained in the psd file, but I had assumed they weren't included in the saved png. (Maybe this is somehow getting at the difference between saving and exporting, but exporting doesn't seem to produce the right file type in photoshop). Anyway, cropping out the rest of the stuff at the end seems to help, as does re-saving it in preview as valley suggests below.

Re: compressing your icons?

[goodbyebird]

Dragging a cap into a new canvas is how I do it as well - actually, no, I copy the cap I've opened and then paste it in, it actually does something weird if I drag it in directly for some reason. Try that? - it's just that my images aren't smart objects, and as I mentioned before, smart objects retain the information of ever format it's in, which makes it much bigger in size.

Are you sure you're not choosing "import as smart object" or some such along the way? When you first open an image in photoshop, is it labeled as a smart object? You really shouldn't have to do a whole song and dance during the saving process to get it below 40kb.

Re: compressing your icons?

[frayadjacent]

Thanks, I'll try the copy and paste thing!

I'm a little confused about the smart object thing -- if I right click on one of my layers, one of the option is "convert to smart object", which I wouldn't have thought would be an option if it were already a smart object. But you said that the layers say smart object thumbnail. Where are you seeing that? Does it even say it on the gradient layers and stuff? Sorry, I don't actually know what a smart object is! I'm definitely not choosing any import options or anything like that.

Re: compressing your icons?

[goodbyebird]

Yep, just dragged it over and it was a smart object. So basically, just paste it in instead of dragging, and see if that works out?

(for me it's CAP cmd+a , cmd+c, NEW CANVAS cmd+v)

Re: compressing your icons?

[frayadjacent]

Cool, thanks so much for your help!