An avatar lets the online community know what you look like -- or perhaps what you'd like to look like.
An avatar is an image used to represent yourself in forums and other online communities. Because an avatar is used to say something about your personality, or to show what you look like, it helps to know make your own. Thankfully there are many accessible image editors, as well as other online tools to help you express yourself with a personalized avatar.
Online Cropper
There are several online picture re-sizing tools capable of cropping a photo and optimizing image resolution for avatars. They will help you set pixel width and height as well as shape the image in a perfect square. To use them, go to the website, upload the photo and follow the online instructions on crop and save the image.
Online Avatar Creator
An online avatar creator will let you make a cartoon-style avatar with different facial features, much like the avatars used for popular video game systems like the Wii and Xbox 360. These creation tools allow you to shape a character's face, including jaw, mouth, eye and nose shapes. You can then add specific hair styles, tattoos, eyebrows, and other identifying marks to make the avatar unique.
Image Editor
Using an image editor like Adobe Photoshop, GIMP, or Corel Paintshop Photo Pro, will let you edit any photo you want with many more options than online avatar croppers provide. The downside is, because of the wealth of features, the programs can be more difficult to use or navigate through if you're looking for only basic tasks. Nonetheless, once you've found it and familiarized yourself with it, just using the cropping tool in these programs makes adjusting image size and resolution a relatively simple task.
Unedited Photos
In reality, an avatar may just simply be a photo or image. You can use an unedited photo as an avatar but in such cases you will have to be careful about the photo you select. A close-up photo is a necessity because when the image is shrunk down, many features of the picture will be impossible to identify. The file size of the photo may also be too large, in some cases limiting the sites that you can upload the avatar too. Still, if you're an absolute novice, an unedited photo is a good, easy alternative for making an avatar.
