Help Why is it that...

I saved my avatar as a .png file, and the quality looks realllllllllly bad?

 

That used to happen to me too.
I'm guessing it has to do with being a regular member and not a premium,but I could be wrong.​

 

Can you post the original image?

 

'Cause .png sucks :P
Save it to .bmp for better quality.

 

Sure thing.

[edit] Eeeww! It looked fine on photoshop!

 

The file you attached is a JPEG, not a PNG. JPEGs usually have lower quality when you don't put it on the maximum settings. When you're saving in Photoshop, go to File -> Save for Web..., choose the file type you want, and click one of the four examples. There will be a couple of options with varying file sizes.

JPEGs are good for avatars because they have smaller file sizes, although quality is sometimes compromised. PNGs are normally used for larger images, but they have large file sizes although they are of high quality.

I can take screencaps if you need help.

 

It also depends what sort of things are going on in the picture. When you work with sophisticated image editing programs like Photoshop, .pngs are incredibly useful for retaining quality of the picture while keeping file size relatively low. This is particularly true for things like opacity changes over various layers. If you (OP, that is) have the resources--and time--try blending two image layers with opacity changes, and save them individually as .gif, .jpg, .png, and .bmp. You'll find that in .gif and .jpg, the parts where both images overlap (i.e. parts of transparency are visible) will more likely be grainy when compared with .png or .bmp.

While true, the file size difference between .bmp and .png is gigantic. For the drastically smaller size that .png offers over .bmp, a lot of the quality is retained if you compress it right.

Frankly, when it comes to compromising good quality images with 'economically' friendly file sizes, I'd say .png takes the cake 90% of the time.