My quest for official art

I mentioned in my introductory post (I'm Ready!) that I collect SpongeBob official art. I have over 202 large, high quality pictures, actually.

I can't upload them all, though. It'd take too long, and I'm afraid I'd get into legal trouble. But I thought I might talk about how I do it. :)

I used to get them off of NickPages. I would go onto my NickPage, stick a SpongeBob picture on, right click and hit "Zoom In." I'd zoom in until it was so big, I couldn't see it all. Then I'd hit Alt+Print Screen on my keyboard, which copies the entire window.

I'd paste it onto a graphics program. My usual choice is the current version of Serif Photo Plus, but anything with layers and transparency will do. Since the screenshots I got were in pieces, I'd have to turn them translucent so I could see all of them, and piece them together. I'd cut off the little bits of window on every layer, then select everything in the background (which is white and gray, so that's easy) and delete it all. Crop it, save it, and I'm done.

I don't do that too much nowadays, because I've got all the NickPage images. And if I do that, there's no alpha transparency. After that, I went onto Nick.de, clicked the SpongeBob Schwammkopf (his German name) icon, and go onto Downloads. They have a bunch of .pdf files, all with large images I didn't have before. I'd download them and go onto Macromedia Flash Professional 8 (or whatever it's called). I'd go onto File > Import > Import to Stage... choose the file I wanted, and leave the settings as is. I'd delete everything except the picture I wanted, which I would make larger, then go again to File > Export > Export Image... and save it as a .PNG. There you have it, a good, large picture with alpha!

I import other things, too. There were a few SpongeBob screensavers with .swf files in them. I can't remember where they were saved in the directory, though. I also once imported the official site for the movie onto the program, and got a lot of stuff I needed off of that. :D