Site Reference Forums

do you have anti aliasing turned on?

depending on the program you are using, it will be an options somewhere. Use the help feature to find is and then make sure it is on or has a tick in its check box.
This feature helps smooth the edges of text

MrStitch wrote:

Could also be the resolution?

Looking at the color 'around' the text, it looks like there is a lot of noise. I've seen that before on low res stuff that was stretched out/resized.

Of course, ms paint could be doing it too. It's not really good software for making crisp images.

Wow... Looking at the file size, I would definitely say a resolution problem. The pictures that you started with (flowers and bread), where did you get those? Do you happen to know if they are in a decent resolution?

As far as good image editors, I'm at a loss. I think we had this discussion before, but I can't remember if there were any good cheap/free ones (doubt it).

The banners look relatively easy to make. Certainly someone here could do them for ya really cheap.

I believe i save those images as .bmp files in ms paint, could that be why the file sizes are so big? would jpg be a better choice?

Woo hoo! MS Paint!

First things first - Bitmap images (.bmp) are bloated, crappy, horrible, disgusting, vile creatures.

Secondly, there are free image editors around. I'm going to assume you use Windows as your operation system. The GIMP has been compared to Photoshop on many different levels. I use Photoshop and have very little experience with The GIMP, however I have seen images created/modified with it and they looked great.

Curious now? Here's where you can download it: http://www.gimp.org/windows/

Gotta love OSS

And third, even if you use MS Paint and save as a .jpg, you still dont get to modify compression options, etc. I know in Photoshop you can, and I would guess you can do the same with The GIMP.

If you decide to give The GIMP a try, there are tutorials that'll help you out: http://www.gimp.org/tutorials/

Need some stock photography for your banners? http://www.sxc.hu provides free stock photography (although some images can't be used for commercial purposes, etc).

Hope that helps

Stitch: MS Paint, from either 98SE or XP on (cant remember which) has the option to save as a jpg. But, as I said above, no compression options or anything. So, yeah they are jpg's, but low res, crappy ones

I don't know that I agree too much anymore with Bitmaps having their uses...maybe some field somewhere uses them, but in my experience I've never been told "send me that file as a bmp".

Unless I have a different understanding of vector graphics, wouldn't an EPS file or the like be the way to go? Not that you're wrong - I don't do much in the graphics side of things anymore so its very possible I'm just ignorant on this matter.

Problem with ms paint is (besides everything it is and does) is that it has no (i cant think of what its called) way of processing images to maintain quality when resizing. For example, in fireworks you can shrink an image and it looks fine, but once it (you) have shrunk the image you can not make it bigger as the pixels have been altered to much.

In corel draw you can shrink the image massively, then pull it right back to its original size with no loss to quality.

In ms paint you can make your image smaller and it loses quality as it would if you were making it bigger simply because it has no way of processing the changes/pixel sizes.  At least thats my experience with ms (i used to make many icons when i was a kid). But i reckon that is the just of it, you may find that if you use a different program (a real life graphics editor) like GIMP you will be able make your own crisp logos quite easily.

Where is Seven? im sure she can explain this in less lamen terms than me