In short, we’ll work with what you sent. We’re still working out the details and glitches with this column/contest, so bear with us as we get everything sorted out in terms of instructions. We will only judge the pieces on content — not on fuzziness or clarity of the image and text.

If anyone wants to create a larger version of your piece (maybe you’d like to print out for yourself!) you can get much larger versions from Flickr (just click the image to go to the photo’s page). Just be sure to resize your piece to 425 pixels wide to conform to the submission guidelines AND to make sure that you’re satisfied with how your text looks at that size.

The reason why the image in the post is getting “pixelated” as it gets resized is because it’s a GIF which only supports up to 256 colors. Photo editing software will generally try to preserve the image’s palette, so when the image is resized all the colors don’t get resampled (a few pixels might need to change to shades of gray from black to maintain a clean looking curve or diagonal in a letter, for example) and since it’s locked into the original colors and can’t pick those new colors required to anti-alias (smooth things out), it’ll try the closest available color in the palette which might be WAY off.

So the bottom line is that if you’re editing a GIF, you should change the color mode from “8-bit color” or “indexed” (a locked palette up to 256 colors) to 24 or 32-bit “RGB color” (millions of colors) before doing anything to it. I’m using Photoshop terminology there, but any decent imaging software should allow for something similar.

In this case, it’s easier to just work with the JPEG from Flickr.

Too detailed an explanation, perhaps.

1. Download the 500 pixel-wide image from flickr.
2. Resize in Picnik (or other editing sofware) to 425 pixels.
3. Add text.

Also, I don’t know why the piece would pixelate in Picnik if someone uses the version they get when they right click on the image in our post. Can you explain that?