First off, here’s how to add emoticons to phpBB:
- uploading smiley pictures to /images/smilies
- on the forum: Administrators section → “Messages” → “Emoticons” → below “Add some emoticons”
- Fill in the fields, tick the box at the top right and that’s it
Now… Often, when you create a new smileys – we take a big picture and reduce its size. In the process of reducing the size of the picture – it gets blurred. There are different algorithms of downscaling, you can change in the settings of Photoshop, but in any case, the result will be lousy. You’ll either have to render it by hand or apply an Unsharp mask, which will ruin the image.
The easiest way out is downscaling with your browser:
- Downscaling (reducing) the picture to twice the size of what the smiley face should be. Example: a smiley is 15×17 pixels. Then we make the original image 30×34.
- Click on the “big” smilies.
- In options add smilies put them the size we want (in the example above – 15×17).
Thus, our smileys will weigh a little more, but they will be nice and qualitative. Basically, you can use this method in normal web 😉 I will be glad to get your comments!