This thread is to collect and combine many previous sets of instructions in how to edit portraits. Included in this thread are the necessary utilities to make those edits, and detailed videos and written instructions to explain the process. These work for both player and coach portraits.
What You Need
- Gimp - A free, useful image editor that I use for all my editing. MS Paint WILL NOT WORK FOR PORTRAIT PROJECTS.
- PhotoShop CS2 - Most PhotoShop programs require a subscription to use. This is supposed to be the same, but Adobe released it for download to everyone a few years ago, and it has stayed within public reach. We'll call our access to it a gray area; a very useful, helpful, much appreciated gray area. Don't look a gift horse in the mouth. It's old, it's ugly, and it is not as good as a new, paid PhotoShop program. But it works. If you don't have PhotoShop already, use this.
- NVIDIA Texture Tools for Adobe Photoshop - Your finished portraits will all be in .dds format. Only PhotoShop's .dds images are compatible with Madden. These Texture Tools are what allow PhotoShop to save in .dds format.
- StingRay's Dat Editor Version 4 - This imports the custom portraits that you will make.
- For Windows 10/11 users only: DirectX Software Development Kit - If you are running Windows 10, StingRay's editor will most likely not run. To fix that, download the the DirectX kit. Previous versions of Windows do not have this problem or need the kit.
- NZA's editor 1.3 - Your most basic roster editing tool. For our purposes, it edits player portrait IDs.
Making Your Portrait
Let's start from scratch. You've installed all the tools above, and you want to make a new portrait for the game. For the sake of an example, let's make a portrait of Tom Brady. By searching through Google, GettyImages, wherever... We found this portrait:
Spoiler:
Now it's time to get down to business. Download the portrait, and load it up in Gimp. (If you are a brave soul that wants to do it all in PhotoShop, I can't help you. I learned it through Gimp, so I stick to what I know. Until you experiment with PhotoShop on you're own, we'll do it my way.) In Gimp, there's a number of instructions to explain, so I shall instead use a video to narrate and show you by hand:
Spoiler:
As mentioned in the video, always save your .dds image with these EXACT settings:
Spoiler:
Importing Your Portrait
By now, you should have a .dds image of the player you want to edit. The hard work is done; now it's just a matter of putting it in the game. At this point, you'll need NZA's Editor and StingRay's Dat Editor Version 4. Here's another video, narrating what you have to do:
Spoiler:
In case you had a hard time following along, I'll make up another example. Let's say that there is a QB named David Carr, and that currently he has a cartoon portrait. You want to give him a real photo, and you've decided that you will take a different QB, Kyle Boller, and use his portrait ID for David Carr. To do this, open your roster in NZA's editor 1.3, and find Kyle Boller. When you find him, go to the Body tab of NZA's editor, and copy his portrait ID (we'll say it's 7). After doing that, set his ID to 0 (which makes it a cartoon). Go find David Carr, and give him Boller's old portrait ID: 7. Save the roster, and load StingRay's Editor.
In StingRay's Editor, load your portrait pack: UIS_LIB_PLAYER_PORT.dat. Load the ID that you plan on using: 7. It should show Kyle Boller's portrait, which you are about to replace with David Carr's. Load Carr's .dds file, and then be sure to SAVE YOUR PORTRAIT PACK. After saving the portrait pack, you're job is done. Load up the game, and you're work is finished.
Note: If you want to make and import a coach's portrait, use the same exact process except for one step. When you edit your portrait in your image editor to crop and resize it, the resized version of the portrait must to be 96x96 pixels in size. If the size is any larger, the coaches portrait pack, UIS_LIB_COACH_PORT.dat, will show a blank portrait ingame. Only coach portraits suffer from this limitation.
