Hello,

I notice on the www.bbc.co.uk (and other news sites) that the thumbnail or small images all appear to be really stunning. The focus is very sharp and the brightness appears to be excellent and the images look amazing for shuch a small size.

(I guess i not explaining this very well - hope someone understands).

My qusstion is - do they apply some filter when making the thumbnail - if yes, what and how is it done?

Or is it just that they have fantastic photographers (I guess they do) but when i make thumbnails they do not have the same effect.

Many thanks

I'd guess it's more the original photos they're working with. I'm sure they start with the highest quality images. Another thought is that the backgrounds behind the images are very plain. When the area just outside the image is neutral it makes the images pop against them.

I can't think of anything they would do to make the thumbnail itself sharp and brighter than the original image.

One can play with contrasts and color balance, but nothing beats a crisply taken photograph.

I usually adjust the levels and then adjust contrast. Also make your thuimbnail focus on something in the picture, don't just make it a small version of the original.

Depending on what you are making thumbnails of a Nice gloss over the top never goes astray

Here are two ways to do it.

1: Make the thumbnail its self beautiful , meaning add border or some creative ness to the thumbnail image itself .

2: By using css in you images *i dont know if this is allowed but * Here is what i have done in my thumbnails see This Ive added some clean border to make the thumbnails like snap shots.

Hope you like my post.
Ace.

A lot of it is starting with a good original. In the link, right now, there's a person shot as a photojournalistic portrait. The man himself is in sharp focus, but the background is thrown out of focus. This is an optical phenomenon called depth of field or bokeh. The contrast between the sharp focus and soft background makes the subject appear sharper than they really are.

Another consideration is that when you resample an image, even when you shrink it, the software applies a Gaussian blur first. It's part of the algorithm; you can read more here. So ... after downsizing an image, you want to sharpen it a little. I find 0.2 pixels radius, 80 % or so amount and 0 threshold works as a good starting point for thumbs.

I stumbled across this website the otherday, I havn't tried it yet but it looks good

http://quickthumbnail.com/

Cheers
Matt

Good info...thanks!

Sorry, can't add answers but I'm thankful, I learned lots of things here. Thanks!