Dreamweaver - Quality thumbnails

Author

Quality thumbnails

yetanotherDave

2004-04-28, 7:28 am

Currently I have maybe 30/40 large reasonable-quality images on my website.
I've reduced the size of these images in Dreamweaver's property bar, often to
half or a third of their size to fit in with the text (but not always
proportionally i.e. I might turn a square photo into a small rectangle).
The problem with this is, obviously, they will still take as long to load for
the user as if they were full size.
I've been using a program called ThumbsPlus to create reduced-sized jpegs, but
the trouble is that the quality is noticably reduced.
I don't know if Fireworks can perform the same task to a good standard because
my evaluation period has expired.

Can you help?

jhking

2004-04-28, 9:28 am

You can just re-size the image in any paint package for starters, eg Paint on
windows. That means that the image you are linking to is the correct size. You
can provide a separate link to the full-size image if that is important.
Programs like Photoshop and Fireworks make it easier to get good quality small
images by letting you change the number of colours (gifs) or percentage quality
(jpegs), for example, and previewing the result before you decide to save. If
you can't afford them, at least re-size the image. Make sure that you are not
're-sizing a re-size'. If you decide the size is wrong, go back to the original
size and re-size again, or the quality will be reduced.

Hope this is of some help

Jo

James Shook

2004-04-28, 9:28 am

I don't know anything about ThumbPlus so I can't say anything about that
program. But some general tips:

* Make sure your software is resampling the image rather than just
throwing away rows and columns of pixels to reduce the dimensions

* Thumbnails tend to need more sharpening and contrast because one pixel
in the thumbnail may have been sampled from many in the original,
resulting in pixels that are just gray mush.

* Make a thumbnail that isn't a reduced version of the entire image. If
the image is complex and has a lot of detail, it will look mushy when
reduced. Instead, find a subsection of the image that is most
characteristic of the image as a whole and use that as the thumbnail.
Your goal is that the subject of the full-size image is recognizable
from the thumbnail.

--James M. Shook
http://www.jshook.com

John Waller

2004-04-28, 5:29 pm

I don't know if Fireworks can perform the same task to a
> good standard because my evaluation period has expired.

Fireworks can do exactly what you want and produce high quality thumbnails.

So can Photoshop Elements or a host of other image editors.

If you're regularly maintaining a website, you'd be wise to invest in a
decent image editor such as Fireworks because you'll need it often.

--
Regards

John Waller

rydershabs

2004-04-28, 5:32 pm

If you want to batch process very large images into whatever size you want,
quickly, this is definitely a great piece of software:
http://www.fookes.com/ezthumbs/?Easy%20Thumbnails=2600 it saved me hours and
hours of time!!!