Thumbnail Creation

[Lynda99]

I'm not happy with my thumbnails. I have PS 7, so I have no bicubic sharp/smooth, etc. I've been reducing the image size in increments, which is a huge pain and doesn't work all that well. My thumbnails are still ugly.

Can someone suggest a technique, or perhaps a software, to enable me to make decent thumbnails? I'm overwhelmed by the software choices.

Plz help.

Here's one of my images:

[Juergen D]

Get IrfanView (free) and use it. This example is resized to 100 px width with the Sharpen option turned on.

Juergen

[Lynda99]

After reading a thread on here about getting a CS4 trial to download using Firefox instead of Explorer, I successfully got it installed.

I just compared the pixels on the Irfanview thumbnail to the CS4 Bicubic Sharp thumbnails I did last night, and they're almost identical. Irfanview works great for this.

Thanks!

[Kraellin]

find some of that new content based reduction software.

[vlasta]

Hm... this is a puzzling topic. I have heard about reducing images incrementally, but I cannot imagine why this should give better results than a proper resampling that does not skip any pixels. In theory, it should give worse results due to incremental errors. Is there any real example demonstrating the results?

Regarding the bi-cubic resizing: Cubic interpolation does not bring any obvious advantages, when using to *reduce* image size. Normal resizing followed by sharpening should be the same (or better, because you can adjust sharpening parameters).

BTW I have a free tool for image reduction at my site ( http://www.rw-designer.com/picture-resize ). If you rename it to PhotoResize200NH.exe, it will resize and sharpen images for you. Good for batch processing. It also can do content aware resizing mentioned by Kraellin, but it is a bit special and only useful in special cases.

[Kraellin]

content aware resizing... that's what i was trying to say. thank you, vlasta. and thanks for the resizer!

btw, why does it have to be renamed?

[Lynda99]

I'm going to go try it, too, and I'm also curious about the renaming.

[vlasta]

The name of the app influences its behavior. 200 is for longest side size, N for sharpening and H for high quality (90%) JPEG compression. There are also another options... Then you drag and drop files or folders on it and all is done.

For content aware aspect ratio change, use PhotoResizeG1024x768H.exe (if you want to resize to 1024x768 of course). This may take a long time, this algorithm is not optimized for speed...