Image Thumbnail Advice

How to reduce images without them turning to mud

[neophyte]

Hello All -

I'm having a mess of a time getting sharp thumbnails of the site's I've built into a thumbnail format.

Here's what I do:

1. Load the home page of a site into a browser
2. Use a screen capture utility to snap an image of the home page
3. paste the capture into PhotoShop
4. Transform/Scale the image from it's captured size (760 pixels x 550 pixels) down to a 165 x 115 pixel thumbnail

And...everything turns to mud - or pretty close to it.
If I sharpen the thumb, it's slightly better, but sharpen too much and it's "halo" city. Yuck.

I know it's an issue of pixel loss during the reduction, but what to do?

Surely there must be a better way as I've seen some sites with small thumbs of large images that are excellent looking.

What are they doing (or what are YOU doing) that I'm not?

Thanks to al in advance,

Neophyte

[vincevincevince]

The only way I know of to do it reliably is to render the web-page virtually, and use proper image size reduction software such as GD or Image Magick. If you know how to use them well, you will get the results you need after tweaking.

The tricky bit is rendering the site virtually on your server, and taking the appropriate image.

[JAB Creations]

It's very simple, GIFs and Photoshop.

Images under 200x200 px will be smaller then their JPEG counterparts at 256 colors.

In Photoshop (I use 7 and dislike how they don't refer to 8 as 8) click on File and then "save image for web" I think.

Turn that dithering crap off, and reduce the colors until you feel you've reduced them enough without distorting the image too badly.

You can literaly shred off tens of kilobytes and NOT put up with jpeg compression you normally see on quick loading sites.

I would not suggest this for larger and more clear images as they will no doubt require more then the alloted 256 colors.

Best of luck!