Custom Portraits Guide

The provided character portraits are all high quality, but you may not find that perfect face to represent your role-playing whim. This guide will show you how to use photo editing software to prepare a custom portrait of your choosing.

Introduction

Hello and welcome to my very first Steam community guide!

Baldur's Gate provides a very nice collection of portrait artwork that you may select for your player character, but many of them are also used by one of several NPCs found in the game. That leaves very few unique faces to represent your player character.

Fortunately, Baldur's Gate does support importing customized graphics for you to use as a player character portrait, so you can find a favorite picture of your choice to represent your inner hero or villain. Both the original Baldur's Gate and the Enhanced Edition will do this.

This guide will focus on the Enhanced Edition v2.0, but the techniques described here-in can be applied to the classic Baldur's Gate, as well.

Quick Summary (for advanced users)

This is a quick summary for anyone who is already proficient with photo editing software.

For anyone who knows how to use photo editing software, this summary is everything you need to know. The remaining guide is for players who do not know how to use photo editing software.

If you do not understand this section, it's OK. Just skip this part and go to the next section.

• In your "My Documents" folder, you should find a "Baldur's Gate - Enhanced Edition" Folder. Inside that, create another folder called "Portraits". This is where your custom portrait files will be stored.
  
• Steamdeck: Your portraits folder is located at "~/.local/share/Baldur's Gate - Enhanced Edition/portraits/"
  
• Each custom portrait must be a 24-bit Windows BMP file, and file names must not exceed eight characters. If the filename is too long, the portrait does not appear in the game.
  
• Stock portraits are 210x330px, but the game will accept custom portraits up to 1024px.
  
• Custom portraits should be cropped to a 7:11 pixel ratio (roughly 0.64:1). At this ratio, the largest acceptable custom portrait is 652x1024px.
  
• Custom portraits are added to the end of the portaits list. They are accessible by selecting to the left.

Setup

Where to store your custom portraits

Windows

Within your "My Documents" folder, you should find a "Baldur's Gate - Enhanced Edition" folder. Go in there, and if it doesn't already exist, create a new folder called "Portraits".

Steamdeck

In desktop mode, open up the Dolphin file explorer. It is the blue folder icon on the bottom bar. If you are not in your "home" folder, click on "Home" on the left. Next traverse through the folders ".local" (yes, this folder's name starts with a dot), and next "share", and finally "Baldur's Gate - Enhanced Edition". The portraits folder should be here.

Download some photo editing software

You can use any photo editing suite you want as long as it supports image cropping, scaling, and saving as a 24-bit Windows BMP file. Just about all of them do, although it's probably best to stay away from Microsoft Paint.

I've provided screenshots of The GIMP v2.8.14 on Windows 7 to serve as a visual aid. The GIMP is an excellent free and open source photo editing application that I like to think of as, "the poor man's alternative to Photoshop." It's free, so go grab it if you don't already have some photo editing software.

http://www.gimp.org/

On the screenshots, important details will be circled or squared-off in BLUE, just as seen above.

Steamdeck

The GIMP can be downloaded through the Discover app under the applications and graphics category. A search for "GIMP" may turn up nothing, as it is formerly listed as "GNU Image Manipulation Program". Trying to use The GIMP with the Steamdeck's controls will likely end up as a tears-and-rage inducing experience of frustration and futility. A proper keyboard and mouse is highly recommended.

You could also create your portraits on a different computer and transfer the files to your Steamdeck.

Creating a Custom Portrait

This image is used for strictly illustrative purposes. Original artist unknown.

For this guide, I want to create someone a bit more exotic — an onna-bugeisha[en.wikipedia.org] (female samurai) type of character. Baldur's Gate: Enhanced Edition includes a few common Japanese medeival weapons and a specialized fighter kit called the kensai (sword saint). So far so good, except there is no appropriate portrait image in the game.

If you do not have any photo editing software by now, STOP and go grab The GIMP[www.gimp.org].

This picture is a beautiful work, but it is a bit large at 1600x1200px. It needs to be smaller and at a different pixel ratio. There is also a lot of extraneous detail that can be removed.

Rectangle Selection Tool

Using a "rectangle selection tool" (very upper-left corner of The GIMP toolbox), use the mouse to draw a box that will be the custom portrait area. This is done by click and dragging the mouse over the image. To help get the box dimensions about correct, your editing software should give you some information about the box you are drawing. For now, do not worry about the pixel size of the selection area so long as it is drawn to a ratio of 0.64:1.

Tip

Unless you have a very steady hand and an exquisite mouse, you will likely have trouble drawing the box to 0.64:1. Much like resizing an application window, you can also resize the selection box by dragging its edges. Although in GIMP, you actually drag from "just inside" the edge.

Crop To Selection Tool

Next is to crop the selection. This will remove everything not within the selection. In GIMP, simply select from the menustrip up top, Image→Crop to Selection. Everything outside of the selection is now gone. That takes care of the extraneous detail we don't need.

Scale Image

We're past the most difficult part. If your crop is larger than 1024px, it needs to be scaled down.
From the menustrip up top, select Image→Scale Image.



Looking at the screenshot above/right...
(a) Change the "height" value to 1024px (or smaller). Although not strictly necessary, if you want to be consistent with the stock portraits, set the height value to 330px.
(b) As long as the chain-symbol is "connected", the width field will automatically change to maintain the correct ratio. If you set the height to 330px, don't panic if the width doesn't equal exactly 210px. It will be very close, and that will be good enough.
(c) Finally, make sure the Quality is set to "Cubic".

Go ahead and click the "Scale" button.

Tip

While doing the scaling procedures, if you make any mistakes, you can use Edit→Undo (shortcut keystroke is CTRL-Z) to return the image to it's previously larger size.

Saving a BMP

Once the image is scaled, save it as a 24-bit BMP file. 24-bits is also known as "R8 G8 B8". In GIMP, you need to use "export" instead of "save." The name of the file cannot exceed eight characters, or the portrait won't show in the game. In GIMP, the option "Do not write colorspace information" has no effect with Baldur's Gate, so you may leave it unchecked.

Using a Custom Portrait

To "install" your nice new custom portrait, copy it into the Portraits folder mentioned earlier.

During character creation, the second part has you choosing your character's appearance. As custom portraits are appended to the end of the portraits list, you can quickly access them by selecting to the left

Tip

Only install the custom portraits you intend to use. Creating/Installing a pack of a hundred custom portraits means you may have to click left through a hundred images to get to the one you want. Ugh!

After picking your custom portrait, continue generating your character. As for the onna bugeisha[en.wikipedia.org] character I was building...



Kiku Tenshi is 90 attribute points of beautiful; exotic; and deadly, and more than capable of delivering samurai-style justice to Baldur's Gate!

Old Custom Portrait Packs

Older packages of custom portraits for Baldur's Gate Enhanced Edition may have different size images of the same portrait, possibly denoted by an 'L' (large), 'M' (medium), or 'S' (small) as the last character of the filename. Assuming that these images were properly cropped to begin with, keep the largest version available and remove the other(s).

It is advantageous to only install those portraits you intend to use. Should you install a hundred portraits, that's a hundred portraits you may have to click through to find the one you want. Blargh.

Therefore, you should first preview and select the portraits you want to use, from outside of Baldur's Gate Enhanced Edition. Then install only those portraits you want. Any photo viewing software will allow you to preview custom portraits.

Classic Baldur's Gate

The techniques described in this guide also work with the original retail disc version and gog.com version of the classic Baldur's Gate. There are a few differences to note:

• The portraits folder goes into where the game was installed, not your "My Documents" folder.
  
• You will need to create two crops for each portrait: a "large" version and a "small" version.
  
• The file names cannot exceed 8 characters and must have an 'L' or 'S' at the end.
  
• Large portraits are 24-bit Windows BMP files at 110x170px, and small portraits are 8-bit Windows BMP files at 38x60px. The pixel ratio remains very close to (but not excactly)
  0.64 to 1. Note that there are different color depths for large and small versions.

[Kindra]

if using a custom portrait in multiplayer, will the other person see the custom image, or a black 'unknown human' portrait unless i share the file to them and they put it in their portraits too? (neverwinter nights had this issue and both required the image on their system)

[maddbadgerr]

I don't supposed there's a way to get the game to filter custom portraits by gender?

[Ancalak]

Thanks, I'll try this later

[Kordac]

Thanks!

This helped me to get the portrait I wanted for my character right!

[Arclayn]

@Ancalak There are two different "Baldur's Gate" folders. One where the game is installed, and the other is inside your Documents. You need to place your custom portraits in the Baldur's Gate Portraits folder in Documents (aka "My Documents"). That is, open your Documents, next go to the Baldur's Gate folder, and then the Portraits folder. If the Portraits folder is missing, then create it.

If you see the Yanner portraits ("Faces of Good and Evil" DLC), you are in the game's install folder and not working in Documents. My advice is to not change these files. (if you had changed any Yanner portrait files and want to reset them back, then try validating your game files)

Hope that helps.

[Ancalak]

Hello, nice guide but I have a problem, Can you help me?
I have the Epic version and I bought the Deluxe edition that already have the folder Portraits with 6 images there named "yanner2a"to "yanner2f", I did that changes in the image that I want to use, made the sizes fit 210x330 and extract to 24-bit, but when I move to this folder and open the game, just doesn't appear, the only thing that I did and worked was excluding the image of a mage called "yanner2f" and saving my custom portrait hgaving the same name, but all guides that I have watched doesn't made in that way so I don't know if I deleted a NPC portrait or just a image only we player can use in the game. Do you have a clue?

[Arclayn]

@Herman Thank you. I will update the guide sometime soon.

[SupremeDistress]

I actually ended up finding it myself (while looking for save locations). For me it was found @
/home/deck/.local/share/Steam/steamapps/compatdata/228280/pfx/drive_c/users/steamuser/Documents/Baldur's Gate - Enhanced Edition/

[Arclayn]

@Herman I will take a look at it, but I can't do that right away.

[SupremeDistress]

If you use a steamdeck and have BGEE installed on the expendable micro sd card, can it still work? I have tried the location you provided above but no luck.