How to create non Squished Thumbnails

[Rich]

How is the best way to make thumbnails from larger pics to come out non squished. I have been reading several tutorials and a few for photoshop tried programs like irfanview (i personally love that picture program!) and easy thumbnails and several others. Talked with a few people on the board about it but no matter what when i have people look at my thumbs they tell me they appear squished?

Maybe someone could share some experiences with this?

Rich
lol

[BabyMaker]

how do u make them?? Post some examples?? Hard to tell otherwise :)

[Rich]

http://daddymugs.com/thumbexample.html

that is one of the ones i did the original pic is at the top 600 x 800

and the nail is below 180 x 150

that i did with irfanview program but i have used several others and just dont seem to be getting the results :(

[huey]

I did this one with ThumbsPlus ..... I think yours looks squished cause you used a landscape thumb for a portrait pic ......

[BabyMaker]

ahh did you crop it or just resize, I think that is the problem. You should set the crop at the thumb size and mouseover the area you want on the big pic, It looks like your are just resizing, which is causing the trouble, if it's not that I am lost lol :)

[basschick]

when you use photoshop to resize pics, you have to constrain proportions if you don't wanna do the math.

with graphics, the first number is always the width, so you're taking a pic that's narrower than it is tall - 600 being narrower than 800 - and you're resizing it so it's wider than it is tall rather than narrower. your thumb would look better at 150x180 rather than 180x150, but the original pic is 600x800, which is 3:4, so you'd need it to be 180x240 to fit the same aspect ratio - or 150x200. both of these sizes are 3:4 and taller than wide.

[Ben]

I'd suggest using Arles to make thumbs (www.digitaldutch.com).

If the pics have different dimensions (e.g. a mix of portrait and landscape pics) you should tick the crop option.

[dzinerbear]

Unfortunately, I find the best way to make thumbs is by hand because of this very problem. But there are some shortcuts.

Take one of your large pictures and resize just the width to say 135. Then notice what size Photoshop naturally resizes the height. From here on in, if your pictures are all the same size, then you can probably set up an action in Photoshop to batch process all your thumbs to that size. When setting up an action, I still only resize the pictures based on the width, so I'll resize them all to 135 pixels wide (those are the portrait ones).

But oftentimes, I have to go through the created thumbs and crop them manually to the size I wanted vertically. Most of the time they're naturally falling at 180, which is what I want, but sometimes sponsors give me odd sized pictures that will not resize properly.

Cheers
Michael

[Squirt]

TIP: Don't forget to do a sharpen after you reside to maintain picture quality.

also on the image example you gave us you need to do a couple adjustments to take out the yellow tint.

The left example is a simple 20% resize and sharpen.

The right example is the same as above with the addition of first selecting "auto levels" then "auto color" then "auto contrast" in Photoshop. I then adjusted the brightness by +15 and contrast by +15

It's not perfect but just a quick example of correct resizing parameters coupled with a little color/contrast/levels manipulation.

[Squirt]

Here is a full size comparison with no resize, but the same sharpen and color/contrast/levels manipulation

[q1sites]

not altogether on topic, but fixing photos would be a good workshop. TAKING them smarter would be another (and this is not meant as a criticism atall, we're all learning, and avoiding yellow lighting improves pics no end, its tricky to photoshop out) --- Basschick are you interested?

This is the best fix I can get -

[basschick]

Q1sites - the secret of not taking yellow pics or video is as simple as learning how to use the white balance on your camera or camcorder. most cameras have an auto white balance setting that most newbs use - i did myself. depending on how good that auto setting is, you may rarely have yellow or blue shoots or have them often. usually the fix is as easy as changing white balance settings or scenes mode when indoors to the graphic that looks like a lightbulb or else to the "incandescent" or sometimes florescent setting.

i'm not sure there's enough photographers here to do a pics shooting workshop, although i'm open. my pics are good amateur quality, but not always the tight, sharp stuff other people achieve - mostly because of lighting.

also if you shoot raw rather than jpb and forget to do your white balance settings, you can change the white balance settings in your raw editor before you save each pic as a jpg. that's one of the things i REALLY love about shooting raw files :)

http://samys.webphotoschool.biz/ the lessons on the bottom of this page actually got me started shooting video - i especially loved working with shoot-through umbrellas as per the lesson.

we could certainly do a pics workshop. anyone else interested?


not altogether on topic, but fixing photos would be a good workshop. TAKING them smarter would be another (and this is not meant as a criticism atall, we're all learning, and avoiding yellow lighting improves pics no end, its tricky to photoshop out) --- Basschick are you interested?

This is the best fix I can get -

[RottenRay]

To be honest, I've gone with "squished" thumbs for an even-looking layout - it gives the surfer a chance to decide whether to click or not and keeps the page size uniform.


Now, here's the important part.

When a surfer sees a page with thumbs that look superb but have been "auto-cropped" so that it seems the full sized images might not show any "fun parts" he'll most likely move on.

Or, he'll waste a ton of bandwidth clicking on EVERY thumbnail after learning he can't trust what the thumbs show.


Q1sites - the secret of not taking yellow pics or video is as simple as learning how to use the white balance on your camera or camcorder. most cameras have an auto white balance setting that most newbs use - i did myself. depending on how good that auto setting is, you may rarely have yellow or blue shoots or have them often. usually the fix is as easy as changing white balance settings or scenes mode when indoors to the graphic that looks like a lightbulb or else to the "incandescent" or sometimes florescent setting.

As long as the lighting doesn't change a lot, you can get a reading for white balance and exposure ONCE and use it for the rest of the photos or video.

(And really, the expensive grey cards you can buy at your local photo emporium are best. Pure white paper is NEVER pure white...)

Most good still cams will allow you to do this easily - set your photometry for "spot" instead of overall, and just keep the bracketed zone on the part of the scene you want to come out right.

Most "pro-sumer" video cameras allow this as well.


The big problem is that most photographers or videographers in this business don't do even 10 seconds worth of setup.

It's actually really easy to get everything consistent if you take the time to take some metrics up front, provided you have a semi-pro camera that will let you do that.

Set the lights up.
Set the model up, and grab a few "reads" from the chest, deepest crotch and face.
AVERAGE these out, and lock your exposure values in.

Then, DON'T change the lighting.

Most auto-exposure programs are designed to give you a nice "snapshot," meaning when you look at a 4" x 6" photo, it will look "pleasant."

What you're looking for in adult material is correct exposure of the meat. Nothing else really matters, unless you're doing a huge shoot for Playgirl or some other rag that wants the background perfect, too.

Just get the subject right. Get the detail, get the color balance correct. Get the focus right.

(Then you won't have a lot of photosets and video to sell to Badpuppy at a discount.)

[gaybucks_chip]

I recently discovered something in Photoshop CS3. Maybe it's been there for years in other versions, and everyone else already knows about it, but I never noticed it until about a month ago, and it's been a true miracle for me.

It's a feature called "Photo Filter", reached from image-adjustments-photo filter menu and then there are 3 warming filters and 3 cooling filters. The filters are calibrated at the same values as the actual CTO or CTB filters used on lenses on film cameras to alter white balance (These filters are mostly old school, from when one bought daylight or tungsten-balanced film, but now the most common use is CTO or CTB gels which are used to convert daylight-balanced studio lamps to tungsten, or tungsten-balanced lamps to daylight.) CTO is "Color to Orange"; CTB is "Color to Blue"

The Photoshop filters make it possible to do a white balance adjustment that, at least to my eye, is pretty much indistinguishable from doing it in the camera.

[mrwilson]

In photoshop it is pretty simple.

If you grab the corner of the picture and hold control while you reduce its size it will reduce the width and height at the same time which prevents it from messing up.

As for colour adjustment, i dont have much experience with that and pictures so i cant help you there.

[q1sites]

Thanks for that link Patti, and the tip about RAW.

[Rich]

Incredible feedback to this question. So much great information related to this. THANK YOU EVERYONE that has replied and then some :) Once again we clearly see why this is probably the best board out there!

:D