Fuzzy thumbnails

[fairestcape]

The saying: "making a silk purse out of a sow's ear" is so relevant in the world of digitised images.

Fundamentally, you cannot easily take a shoddy image and make it look good.

True, there's some clever software out there that can help make a bad pic look better, but the best way to ensure that you have good, professional-looking images is to make sure you start out with good quality pics in the first place.

Many people start with images that are either too small, or too low in resolution (or a combination of both). They then try to make them larger - often by simply adjusting upwards the vertical and horizontal aspect ratios.

This never works.

You must try to get good quality images of your products.

Of course, if you take a pic of your product with a 9m pixel digital camera, the resulting image can be over 2mb in volume.

... and its physical dimensions are enormous too.

So, somehow you need to retain quality, but reduce size (both display size and file size).

You need reasonably good software for this... and guess what...

... There's a lot of it available. If you have a digital camera, it no doubt came with a packaged CD, on which a reasonable image editor is housed. These bits of software are generally OK for turning camera-original pic files into web-suitable pic files.

The best way to work is to experiment with all the variables.

I tend to set my LARGE zencart images at 500 wide and 300 deep (for landscape) and 300 wide and 500 deep (for portrait). If the image subject is not conducive to these aspect ratios (such as a pic of a fishing rod - very long and very narrow), I often put it in a blank background of 300 X 500 anyway.

This ensures that ALL my _LRG images enjoy identical display sizes and aspect ratios.

I try to SAVE the file as jpg at 72dpi with the least compression, but sufficient to ensure it does not exceed 75 - 80 kb.

My _MED images are created in exactly the same way - and NOT from the _LRG versions, but from the ORIGINAL pic.

The main difference is that I now set landscape at 250X150 and portrait at 150X250 (see the aspect relationship here is true to the _LRG... which is 300X500 and 500X300 )