How to make crisper better looking thumbs?
 

Is there a good tutorial out there.

Here's what I use:
Adobe Photoshop

Step #1 go to Filter -> Noise -> Despeckle
Step #2 go to Image -> Adjustment -> Brightness / Contrasl
Step #3 go to Filter -> Sharpen -> Unsharp mask
Step #4 resize, crop whatever you need to do

Was hoping someone could show me some better ways of doing it.

Thank You.

also with Photoshop CS3 if you select "Use Legacy" when using the brightness/contrast adjustment option that helps improve the quality as well.

isn't there an imagemagick tweak for this??......making high quality thumbs in photoshop is very time consuming..........

hmm thanks

can't find it thou :(

Duplicate the layer then apply a surface blur to that. Use the erase tool with a soft brush to take away all the blurred areas that need to be sharp like the hair, eyes, teeth, etc. Then dial down the opacity till some texture shows through and it's natural and your done.

you should do the unsharp mask last, after the crop.

1) Neatimage
2) Imagenomic Portraiture

Both work as Photoshop plugins.

See sig.. go to the far right column and the "Graphics" section.. there's some links to articles about this there.

I have an action setup which basically goes something like sharpen > color dodge > new layer adjustment hue/saturation > flatten. then i blur the flesh with the blur tool quick. not sure off the top of my head what the settings were i'd have to open up photoshop and look again, but i've been using this action for at least a year now. it makes thumbs that satisfy me quickly. if the hue saturation looks wya off i go back in and create new layer quick and bring the tone sback to a natural balance.

bump for more answers!

Props!

Thank man

Everyone is going to have different answers, but if your using Smart Thumbs use this for your Imagemagick command for pics mainly not movies.

filter Cubic -modulate 115,102,100 -sharpen 1x1 -enhance -strip

You can tweak it more or less it suits me fine atm.