Probably the wrong place to post this but I'm not sure where the right place would be. lol

I never seem to be able to make a satisfactory thumbnail for my renders. They usually end up a little grainy at the very best while staying below the tiny 15kb maximum, yet I keep seeing beautiful thumbnails from others in the gallery. I prefer to create a cropped thumb over the site generated full view. The only tutorial I've found so far was for 100 x 100 sized images which is much smaller than I would go with.

If anyone has any tips or a tutorial link it would be greatly appreciated. Thanks.

What graphics program do you use for postwork and thumbnails?  This will help greatly in getting an answer you can use. :)

Me, I use "save for web" in photoshop and in GIMP I apply a TINY amount of gaussian blur before saving to kill some of the grain.

Most of my images get posted on 3dcommune. The thumbs are 4X5 40ppi ( reduced from 8X10 @a125ppi) and save for web in PS7, with quality set at 30% to 50% to comply with their 15k size limit. The easiest way to view these is to go to 3dcommume and look in either the Daz or 2D galleries.

Mike
aka Mivan on 3Dcommune

I found this tut handy. Jenny

http://www.renderosity.com/mod/tutorial/index.php?tutorial_id=968

well there you go, i have just learned something myself. all my thumbnails i do takes me ages to get them to the correct size for uploading and all because i did it the wrong way..

thank you guys/gals.

Glad to help.

Sorry for the super-duper-extraordinarilly-late thanks! So uhm... thanks! I feel kind of stupid for not already knowing or being able to figure it out, but I appreciate all the help. Thanks again.

No sweat. You should see me replying to my stuff, I have to battle the moths to get through sometimes!!

I too have trouble with saving thumbnails. I do as suggested in that tutorial, I go have a look-see at the properties of my TN before I even upload it... its 33. something kb! and that is set on medium! I use Photoshop CS2 by the way.
Anymore help is appreciated.

Well pbellows, since starting this thread I have refined my thumbnails without any problems. I too use CS2, here's what you need to do.

1. Decide on a size. I now make all my thumbs 180 x 180 so they will all fit in a uniform manner in my gallery and not be too small.

2. Use the "SAVE FOR WEB" option. This is the real secret! At the image size I'm using at 60% to 80% quality the filesize will be around 13kb. It all depends on the amount of colors in the image.

It's really just that simple, give it a try.

that is exactly what I do... except for the size of the image itself... I'll try it
Thanks

I usually make thumbs with a free app called Irfanview.

I can crop out and save as a jpg with 5% compression, at 175x175 resolution and almost always make it under the 15kb limit, no problems.