Help! What am I missing?

Hi Julie,

I believe I saw the directions for this in the NEWBIE group at Active Rain. Try that! Just so you don't feel like you're all alone..I haven't changed my picture overe yet,either.

If it makes you feel any better I am going to have to go back and find this article in the Newbie Group......

but I am kinda attached to my fuzzy photo.

The HD term is actually a little confusing.  What it means is before you start you need to have a picture that is at least 600 pixels on each side (in Windows for most computers, hold your mouse over the file and the dimension will pop up, like "Dimension: 1280 x 640).  If you have a photo that is already at least 600 on each side (800x600, 750x900, whatever), then you can upload it. At that point AR will show you a box that you can move around to show the part of the picture that you want to use. 

Brad's post announcing this said you didn't need direstions... and he makes it clear that it has to be at least 600x600.  Of course, that doesn't mean that it has to be a clear, in-focus 600x600 photo -- you can use a soft-focus if you want to! :)

P.S. I hit "Submit Comment" instead of writing my next sentence, which was: Have fun -- you may have photo software that would do a nice soft focus, too, and just save the photo as a larger file/more pixels.  Hope this helps! :)

Julie - Not to toot my own horn, but I did just write a post about this earlier today.  It's real simple.  You can contact me if you have any additional questions.

Easy to do.  Don't let it confuse you.  Good luck.  P.S.  FUZZY is good.

i did it today and figured out that my image had to be 600wide and 600height and in JPG format before the system would accept it. Your picture may not be that large so a trick I used was creating a simple box that was 600x600 and the inserted my logo and info in the center.

To your question -- HD resolution produces richer content for images and as you can see a lot of pictures on this site appear to be a bit fuzzy. In my photography business I shoot everything at HD Resolution and then use a compression editor to make it web ready. Believe it or not the images do not loose the HD quality as long as you don't lower the DPI settings while compressing the photo's. 

Julie, I hope you got your picture on.  It looks good so I'm guessing that you did.  It's pretty easy to do from your settings but like they said you have to have an HD photo. 

Here is my interpretation of the HD photo that your looking for. if the photo is blurry low res to begin with it wont matter if you resize it to make it larger, the results will still be far from satisfactory. What you need to get a true HD photo is to get some new headshots taken by a professional or with a DSLR at a high resolution. once you've got yout high resolution photo simply downsize it to the 600x600 with photo editing program of choice and upload the photo.

Another good image resizing solution I highly recommend that is FREE is the image resizer power toy for Windows XP, which is downloadable free from microsoft.com. It has amazing compression retaining exceptional quality.

So glad you asked the question and I'm even happier there were great answers.  Sounds simple enough now that I know.

Thanks.