GD Quality seems to be terrible

[lindajames]

Hi,

I've got this script that makes a thumbnail out of a image I upload using GD but the quality seems to be really rubbish. I made the exact same dimension thumbnail in a Photo package (ULEAD) and i got a crystal clear thumbnail. Usually the smaller you make an image the better it should go. But here it seems like its distorting and it looks just like a text looks when anti-aliasing is not used.

any ideas or comments would be appreciated.

Cheers

[Robber]

We had problem that sounds similar, we did a site for an estate agent where they could upload their property photos and it created thumbnails for them. After a few months the web host upgraded their version of PHP and the images were really poor quality. I cant remember the exact problem but it was possibly relating to ImageCreate being used instead of ImageCreateTrueColor.

Cheers

[lindajames]

it seems that ImageCreateTrueColor doesnt work with GD1 any other ideas?

[HelenDev]

AFAIK, scripting images to squash to a smaller size, rather than actually resizing them with a graphics package, usually creates thumbnails of dubious quality.

I create a small thumbnail gif of each image when I make and upload the full size jpeg images. It only takes a couple of seconds extra.

[pete_m]

Is installing GD 2.01 or later out of the question?

I get reasonable results creating thumnails with imagecreatetruecolor - not as good as doing it manually, but acceptable quality.

[dcrombie]

I've never had a problem using ImageMagick and calling commands via system().

[lindajames]

pete_m installing GD etc is out of my league as its a shared server :( any other ideas?