How to make quality mini images for epub publishing?

[MichelCrokinole]

Hi everyone,

This is my first question on this forum.

I'm writing an illustrated text book. Most images are 500 x 500 pixels and they look great. Now I want to make two images about the size of a standard computer desktop icon. I know, not a great reference.

I tried a 500 x 500 pixel image and resized it to 128 x 128 pixels.
I tried making the image 128 x 128 pixels right from the start.

The results are both the same. When I insert the image in a MS Word document , this image is blurry. When I convert the MS Word document to epub or even PDF, the image is even more blurry.

Can anyone tell me what to do?

Thank you

[rich2005]

Think about it, scaling down from 500 x 500 (250,000) pixels to 128 x 128 (16,384)  pixels throws away 90% of the image information. Might be OK with a simple image but anything complicated and interpolation makes the image blurry. 

...but then, how are you viewing the scaled down 'icon' ? Zoom in and will look terrible, at normal size might look OK.

What you can try is setting interpolation to None in the Image -> Scale Image  dialogue. That gives an image with "jagged edges" usually you try and avoid those. Up to you to decide. 

   

For the 'icons' left side is 'NoHalo' interpolation , right side is 'None'

[MichelCrokinole]

(12-13-2021, 09:20 AM)rich2005 Wrote: Think about it, scaling down from 500 x 500 (250,000) pixels to 128 x 128 (16,384)  pixels throws away 90% of the image information. Might be OK with a simple image but anything complicated and interpolation makes the image blurry. 

...but then, how are you viewing the scaled down 'icon' ? Zoom in and will look terrible, at normal size might look OK.

What you can try is setting interpolation to None in the Image -> Scale Image  dialogue. That gives an image with "jagged edges" usually you try and avoid those. Up to you to decide. 



For the 'icons' left side is 'NoHalo' interpolation , right side is 'None'

Thank you for the information. I will try what you say.