First of all, if you already have an icon (it has to be 20x20 jpeg and under 50 Kilobytes) Then you can upload it by opening the Guild Menu with Alt-G, clicking on "Management" then "look for" and finding your file wherever you put it.
As you can see, I have Hobbes the Tiger set as my guild icon. However, I don't think the trial version icon editor I used did a good job resizing, so I'm gonna try again with a real editing program. I use The GIMP (yes, this is a link) because it's free and can do anything Potatoshop can. If you want to use Potatoshop, feel free, but the buttons are gonna be in different places. Besides, if you're using Potatoshop you're probably better than me at image manipulation anyway, why are you reading this thread?
So first I need an image. Google image search is our friend. I found this on some random Calvin and Hobbes fansite:
Not bad, but it's very clearly far too big. In fact, when I open it in GIMP it tells me that it is 90x104. This will not do.
Oh noes! Too big!
What I need to do is use the zoom tool, shown here:
to zoom in, and then use the rectangle selection tool:
to click and drag a box around the part of the picture I want, thusly:
Using the selection tool.
you can't see it, but my cursor is on the lower right corner of that little box. PrintScreen doesn't capture the mouse for some reason. Anyway, there are a few things to notice about this picture. You'll notice that the lower left corner tells the coordinates that the cursor is at. This is very useful, note the coordinates you start your selection at and if you want to move the box over one pixel, start one pixel over next time. Even more useful is the white box on the bottom that says "Selection: 60x60". This is telling me that the area I selected is exactly 60 pixels by 60 pixels. You want the dimensions to be a multiple of 20 (the closer to 20 the better. 40 would be better than 60, and if you can actually hit 20x20 then that's excellent) and above all IT MUST BE SQUARE! Bad things will happen if you make it, say, 40x60.
now that I've selected my box, I'll go up to "Image" and then "Crop Image"
Cropping.
Now I have just my icon.
Handsome devil, isn't he?
What's that you say? It's not 20x20? How observant of you! let's fix that now.
If yours is already 20x20, skip ahead. Your icon is going to look much better than mine.
This time I'm going to go to "Image" and then "Scale Image." I get this window:
The scaling dialog
Now I change the settings to this:
How it should look
Don't worry if your resolution is different, Rappelz doesn't care about pixels per inch, just raw pixels. I click "Scale" and get this:
Finally, the legendary 20x20
Well isn't that... lovely. Don't worry, it'll look MUCH better when it's not zoomed in 400%. Now all I have to do is save it. All I have to do is name it something ending in .jpg and GIMP automatically realizes I'm trying to make a jpeg. Amazing! But oh, no! I get an error message:
Grar! Trog smash error!
Don't panic! it's just because the image I started with had transparency. no big deal, I'll just convert it to RGB. now I get this box:
Almost done!
All I have to do is drag the "quality" bar all the way over to 100% (I only have 400 pixels, I can't afford to lose any) and click "Okay."
There, I'm done. Now I just upload it, like I explained way up there at the top.
That's a definite improvement, although I think I'll change it later to something less... copyrighted. Or maybe not, I think it falls under "fair use." But there's no way I'm rewriting this tutorial.
