My almost 13 year old daughter is having a hormonal quirk at the moment. She uses Paint to make avatars. She somehow expands the image and cleans up the squares of color by doing this. It makes the image clear when reduced in size.

Why are kids so much smarter than us adults?! At the moment, she wont teach me because something with her little popularity princess group of friends just didn't go her way, I guess. She is just too frazzled to show me. Oh, she is quite adult enough to hog my computer that I worked and paid for though. That AOL IM friends list is something else! She is barking at me because she is upset about a stupid ex boyfriend that she was never allowed to see alone, ever. Girls think this is a serious matter.

I need more help than avatar advice! Help me clean up the image with Paint and I will be thrilled though!

It is easy to increase the size of the image. Use the zoom option... by hundreds of percents. I have used that technique many times to alter the appearance of my photographs and images. the blocks of color (pixels) are then zoomed in to be sizes of 1 to 2 inches....... it is a slow process but you can alter the color and shape.

Sorry to be stupid, but are you using Paint also? Under what do I find the Zoom option?

Hi Wildflower, open your image in paint,click View\Zoom\Custom and select 800% click OK. (or in the toolbox to the left click on the magnifying glass and in the panel beneath the tools select 8x ) the image should be large enough now to see the individual pixels.
In the left bottom corner there is a group of 28 coloured boxes,and 2 overlapping boxes the overlapping boxes represent the foreground and background colours,if you left click on one of the 28 colour boxes the foreground box changes to that colour, and right clicking on a colour changes the background box to that colour.
So left click on the red box and right click on the blue box, making the foreground colour red and the background colour blue,now in the toolbox click on the pencil icon,then left click on a pixel in your image,changing that pixel to red, now right click on the same pixel and it changes to blue.
You can also select a colour from within your image, in the toolbox click on the eyedropper icon (it is above the pencil and to the left of the magnifying glass) now left click on any pixel in your image, the foreground colour now changes to that of the selected pixel, click on the eyedropper again and right click a pixel to change the background colour to that of the selected pixel.
To make image backgrounds white, left click on the white box to make the foreground colour white, select the pencil and carefully left click the pixels closest to the outline of your image, (you can also left click holding the button down and drag the pencil).
Once you have done the fiddly bits closest to you image, you can change to the eraser tool to do larger areas.
Right click on the white square again to make the background colour white, select the eraser tool, click on one of the black squares in the panel beneath the tools to select the size of the eraser block, then clean up the remainder of the background.
Press Ctrl+F to view your image (original size) anytime during the editing process,left click to return to 800%. If you make any mistakes clicking Edit \Undo lets you undo the last 3 edits.
Before doing any edits I save a copy of the original image, File\Save As and add a 1 to the end of the filename, so if anything goes wrong I still have the original unedited image to try again! if it is likely to be a long job, I frequently preview the image( Ctrl+F ) and if I am happy with it Ctrl-S to save the edits done so far.


[This message was edited by redder on 09-07-03 at 07:10 AM.]

This message has been edited. Last edited by: DorianGreyed,

Or try THIS (Easy Thumbnails). The second link I mentioned works.

That'll enlarge and Reduce with the least ammount of spots. Prety easy and free.

ivnj