shrinking pics

[prohunter]

Why is it everytime I shrink a pic the quality goes south in a hurry. I would like to use some different pics as my avator, but they look terrible when shrunk down. Am I doing something wrong? I shrink with Microsoft PictureIT

 

[Hunter29]

A good photo editor such as photoshop will resize the picture and maintain a reasonable amount of quality.

 

[Lan-Lord]

I always found that heavy sharpening was needed to reveal the details of a thumbnail. I think the problem is created when the software tries to scale too much detail down to such a small size. It ends up washing out alot of the details. Photoshop (elements too) has some robust sharpening tools. Be careful though, you can make it look worse sometimes.

In Photoshop, for thumbnails, I like to use Unsharp Mask at ~40%-60% at 4-6pixels. Leave threshold at 0. It takes some playing around with though.

 

[prohunter]

thanks! I will try Photoshop.

 

[JlazyH]

I just make thumbnail of it and take it to the size required.

 

[BRIANCARROLL2573]

Go into MS paint and open the picture. Then hit ctrl+W. A window will pop up with size values of 100%. Type in 50 or 30%. That always works for me.