I know I'm biased, but I find the random gallery thumbnails at the top of the main forum page fascinating. Inparticular, some thumbnails look rather unattractive, but when viewed at larger size are quite nice. But even more interesting to me is that some look quite interesting as thumbnails, but when viewed in actual size are rather meh (or worse).

So I guess my questions are, is this a real thing, that they actually do look better (or worse), or is it just the mind filling in missing information, and my particular mind fills in information that makes it look better? Like catching a quiet, noisy snippet of a song that sounds quite nice, but upon purchase and careful listening isn't what I imagined (that happens often for me with songs in movies and tv shows).

Also, zooming in is standard practice when working on images, but how many of you zoom wayyyyy out as well?

When doing a retouch i want it to look good, no matter how it will be shown. A small thumbnail or a big billboard, 10% or 200%, a retouch should always be good enough. Thus zooming way out is important! :wink:

Tho when it comes to contrast and sharpness its harder, especial when you dont know how the image will be used. (that i usualy dont)

I know I'm biased, but I find the random gallery thumbnails at the top of the main forum page fascinating. Inparticular, some thumbnails look rather unattractive, but when viewed at larger size are quite nice. But even more interesting to me is that some look quite interesting as thumbnails, but when viewed in actual size are rather meh (or worse).

So I guess my questions are, is this a real thing, that they actually do look better (or worse), or is it just the mind filling in missing information, and my particular mind fills in information that makes it look better? Like catching a quiet, noisy snippet of a song that sounds quite nice, but upon purchase and careful listening isn't what I imagined (that happens often for me with songs in movies and tv shows).

Also, zooming in is standard practice when working on images, but how many of you zoom wayyyyy out as well?

You are correct Doug, many images appear much better than they actually are to view them as thumbnails, as you see them smaller they have less and less detail and information. As you said, your mind fills this information as you want to see the image, of course that can lead to disappointments. The good news is when the thumbnail does not seem interesting because your mind is not able to see or imagine what's really on the image and zooming in makes you suddenly surprised some interesting detail.
Here I leave with you two examples that I think can illustrate this theme.
The flower comes from Google and for me look much better zoom in.
The girl is a modification of an image that I retouched yesterday for another thread here in Retouchpro. Both girls as a thumbnail look the same but are not. (http://www.retouchpro.com/forums/classifieds/19155-high-end-fashion-beauty-retoucher-required.html)