How to Thumbnail in Photoshop

Tech How To

Making thumbnails in Adobe Photoshop is really very easy. It can create a much clearer thumbnail for you than many other methods, and you are able to select as much or as little of the picture as you’d like. The secret is in the Crop Tool, which is selected in the image below. Now, for the best part: you can define what size you want the final thumbnail to be, whether you want a 150px by 150px thumbnail or anything in between. Double clicking the image once the desired area is selected will create the thumbnail.

I have found that using the Save for Web feature will spit out a nicely optimized thumbnail for quick loading, but can sometimes be blurry. A good way to correct this is the following: after cropping your image, go to the Layer menu and select Duplicate Layer. Then, add a Gaussian Blur filter with a 1-2 pixel value via the Filter menu. From the Layer window, select “Soft Light” or “Screen” as shown.
Change the opacity to between 30-60%, and flatten the image (the side popout menu on the Layer window). There, much better! If you’re not a fan of Photoshop, I highly recommend Arles Web Page Creator. It has some really nice built in features and will create some very sharp clean thumbnails. It’s free to try and a valuable tool for your arsenal.