The file is read in your browser and isn’t uploaded anywhere, so you can check unfinished skins too.
Five things to check
- The arm model. Slim skins are painted for 3-pixel arms, classic skins for 4-pixel arms. Switch between the two in the viewer. A slim skin on classic arms shows a stripe of empty or leftover pixels on each arm; a classic skin on slim arms loses a column of detail.
- The outer layer. Toggle it off and on. The hat, jacket, sleeves and trouser legs should sit slightly above the base layer and not cover anything you meant to show.
- Every side. Rotate to the back, top and underside. Unpainted faces are easy to miss in a flat image editor.
- Solid patches. In Java Edition the base layer can’t be see-through. Pixels you left transparent there are drawn solid, often black. See why parts of a skin look black.
- Mirrored limbs on old skins. A 64 × 32 skin has no separate left arm or leg. The game copies the right ones, so asymmetric designs need the 64 × 64 format.
How the viewer guesses the arm model
A PNG doesn’t record whether it is slim or classic. The viewer checks the pixels a slim arm leaves unused: if they are transparent, it assumes slim. Skin editors don’t always leave them empty, so if the guess looks wrong, switch the model yourself. When you upload, you pick the model separately from the file.
Making a profile picture from the skin
For a forum avatar or Discord picture, the Head Generator takes the 8 × 8 face with the hat layer on top and scales it without blurring.
What a preview can’t show
- Capes, which are a separate texture on the profile.
- How the skin looks with resource packs or mods that change the player model.
- Bedrock Edition persona items, which aren’t PNG skins.