§ Contents 
Glossary Articles Books Software Typeface Webmaster Links
Creating perfect thumbnails
Graphic Converter is the ideal application for creating thumbnails from any image format to any other image format, and with powerful batch processing, the task can be blindingly fast.
The key is to properly set up your "Batch..." settings, so you will need a licensed copy of the software. First you need to ensure that the left window is set to only read JPEG files (this means you can write your thumbnails back into the same directory without fear of causing problems, you could even redo all the thumbnails and it works perfectly).
Then set the options for the right window. The file type is best as GIF, then select Options. Everyone can read 89a format GIFs nowawayd and they are smaller. You can also select "Optimize Colors" to make sure they are rock bottom size but this may hurt quality.
Now ready for your "Batch..." settings. These are a number of filters that are applied to each image. After much trial and error I've discovered the best settings and order for these operations, so here goes.
Colors - set this to 8 bit, Optimize Color Table, Reserve 2. This will turn your picture into a 256 colour picture. Now it's time to shrink it to fit our thumbnail size.
Max Size - make sure you set it to "proportional". We use 100 pixels wide by 120 high for our size but you may want them larger (I don't recommend any smaller). This shrinks the image so that it is less than our thumb size and proportional to the original image.
Bring To Size - set this to the same size you used in "Max Size", make sure you have "Center" set for both width and height. With this one "Color" is the critical value. What this filter does is surround your thumbnail with a certain colour to ensure that it is exactly the right size. We have a white page background so we set "Color" to white (or a hue of 0, saturation of 0 and a brightness of 65,535). You may prefer a different page background, just make sure that the page background and this colour are the same.
Now you're ready. Just hit the convert button and the thumbnails will be created.
Tell us 