Make Thumbnails
A thumbnail is a reduced size version of a full-size photograph, document or screenshot. The advantages of thumbnail pictures are that they take up less room on a website and consequently the server, they have the ability to load much faster than the full-size version and it gives viewers the ability to view more than one illustration per page. You can learn how to make thumbnails using these step-by-step instructions.
Steps
- Choose the photographs or other media you want to reduce to thumbnail pictures.
- Use photo editing software to make a copy of the illustration.
- Perform all edits, with the exception of sharpening, in your editing program before making the copy. Sharpening will be done after the size reduction.
- Apply a dust and scratch reducing filter or a strong blur filter to your illustration.
- Select "Filters" on your toolbar and choose the filter you want to apply from the dropdown menu or toolbar. This process will reduce or eliminate any graininess or other imperfections to the photograph before it is reduced to a thumbnail.
- Optimize the photo and crop it.
- Use the cropping tool in your editing program and select the area you want to crop away. This could be empty spaces or irrelevant parts of the picture.
- Reduce the original picture size.
- This can be done by choosing "Resize" from the edit dropdown menu or toolbar. Most programs will let you choose how you want the size reduced, either by pixels or percentages. Use whichever works best for your needs.
- Increase the saturation of the thumbnail.
- Saturation is the amount of color in the illustration. The colors stand out better with thumbnails if you increase saturation. You can do this by selecting "Colors" from the toolbar and select "Saturation" from the dropdown list.
- Apply a sharpening filter to the thumbnail.
- You will find "Unsharp mask" in the "Filters" dropdown on the toolbar. Contradictory to what you might think, this tool will actually sharpen the image. This allows for sharper detail and will bring out artifacts in the thumbnail that might otherwise be missed.
- Add a border to the thumbnail.
- This element is optional, but it will help your thumbnails stand out from the page. Border options can usually be found in the toolbar dropdown menu under "Select." Usually a black border is ideal, but experiment with other colors to find a suitable border.
- Save the image.
- The most universally recognized format to save any thumbnail is JPEG. Make sure that you set your quality high (80 percent or higher) so you do not lose the details in your thumbnail due to JPEG compression.
- Alternatively, you could use the PNG format, which saves the quality. It takes more room in your storage than JPEG, however.
Tips
- You can purchase photo editing software or you can download free software that will have all the tools you need to create JPEG thumbnails.
Warnings
- Do not alter the size of the original photo. Always use a copy of the original to create JPEG thumbnails.
Things You'll Need
- Illustrations or photos saved to computer
- Photo editing software
Related Articles
- Use Filters in Illustrator
- Crop in Illustrator
