How to make a solid KAG Avatar and signature

I don't know what other forum category this would belong in, but here goes: I've been trying to get a good screenshot of me in KAG to make as my avatar. I'm big into computers (built my own) and have played video games since I was 5, but I was never really into forums, especially being involved in one over a sustained amount of time.

SO my questions are how to make a good avatar and signature? My focus right now is on my Avatar. I took a screenshot using Steam (bad move?). Then I, yes -get it out of your system and rofl all over the place-, used MS Paint to try and crop the shot and zoom in and whatnot. You can see my avatar right now as of Feb 23rd, and it's all fuzzy and looks like crap. How do I make myself an Avatar worthy of respect? How do I get a good resolution, and good zoom on my character so that he and my screen-name are clear? Is there somewhere I can go instead of wasting others' time explaining this?

If there is already a thread that exists for this I apologize; couldn't find it. But if not, maybe this is the place that eventually a lot of the new-comers to the community who don't know much about forums will come to when they're out to make their own custom KAG avatars and sigs in the future.Thanks ahead of time for all the feedback! I look forward to the advice I hopefully receive. As a token of my appreciation to the future from back in the past, I come bearing gifts of gold bullion:

 

I'll just shove this into the art section I guess. You can zoom in-game by using the mousewheel, and take screenshots by using f4 (this'll save a screenshot in kag directory/screenshots) open up the file in any sort of image editor (GIMP, MS Paint). MS Paint is fine but after resizing make sure you save the image as a .png.

 

When you resize pixel-based stuff and want them crisp make sure to always pick the simplest resizing method your editor provides. E.g in photoshop always pick Nearest Neighbour instead of the fancier bicubic resampling. Some editors have separate Resize and Resample functions, choose Resize. To illustrate:

original image

double in size, bicubic

double , nearest neighbour (preserve hard edges)


As Kagesha said, to preserve all detail , pick either GIF or PNG , as JPG introduces lossier compression that might result in artifacts and ugliness overall.

 

Alright I will do that and make sure to come back here so I can make sure I'm doing it right. Thank you both for the help :)

 

The other thing I forgot to mention is that I wanted to zoom in all the way, but when I do, my screen name is over my character's eyes instead of below his feet or above his head.

Maybe you're not supposed to zoom-in fully, but I'd like it if I could and have my name be below my character. It seems like some people have done that on here. If not then I'll just try to zoom-in in MS Paint or photoshop.

 

Quote from the avatar upload dialog:

If your avatar is an ingame screenshot this is bad and the avatar will get blurred.

This forum resizes avatars to 96x96 for messages and to 192x192 for your profile page. If you want to preserve every single pixel in your avatar, you should create the avatar in 96x96 and resize to 192x192 (using 'nearest' filter). This way you get crisp text and small details won't get blurred.

 

If you want to take screenshots with smooth shader enabled swap to a resolution of 1024x768.
I got the best results when zooming out at the second level (newest version removed the third level).