Making Good Thumbs
This article is a quick tutorial showing you how to use Photoshop to make nice, clear thumbs even if then original pic that they are coming from isn’t that great. Having a high quality thumb sample can help draw more clicks to your gallery/site and increase your bottom line. It’s a little step that many people overlook. Common practice is to just resize the thumb to the size you want and be done with it. If we do that with this thumb, this is how it looks. It’s not bad, but it could be better. Next we want to sharpen the image. To do this go to Filter - - Sharpen. We now have an image that is brighter and sharper than before. Now it’s time to get rid of some of the blemishes and rough spots on the pic. First use the Zoom Tool to zoom in to 300%. Next select the Blur Tool. I set the pixels somewhere between 5-10 pixels depending on how big of an area I need to work in. Take the Blur Tool and star “blurring” away all the rough areas and blemishes. As a rule of thumb I typically do a light brush over all the skin on the girls and then do more where there might be a pimple or a wrinkle or a spot or anything you want to get rid of. Don’t do too much or you will lose the detail. After playing around with a little bit you will get the hang of it.
For this example I will be using a pic from Brandi Belle. This is a screen shot taken from a gallery. We will be making a thumb that is 200 X 145. I’m not Photoshop expert. If I can do this and touch up pics and make good thumbs, anyone can.
Here is the original pic.
Let’s start with selecting some of the area. With this thumb I want to focus on the action. People don’t care what the walls look like; they want to see the pussy. So I’m going to crop the picture to make the action the center of the new thumb.
Once you have selected the area you can copy and paste it into a new image. Resize that image to the size you want the thumb to be. In this case that is 200 X 145. Once you have the newly cropped thumb the correct size we want to increase the brightness and contrast a little bit. We want to make the thumb really pop out at the viewer. Go to Image - - Adjustments - - Brightness/Contrast. Make sure the preview box is checked. Here you can experiment some with the setting and see what looks best. For this particular thumb I used a brightness of 16 and a contrast of 26. The picture had some shadows in it and those numbers helped to get rid of them.
That’s it. Once you are done blurring zoom back out and you have a new and improved thumb.
Put it side by side with the old one and you can see the difference.
Reader Comments: (1 posts)
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Lotta says: Haha, sholdun't you be charging for that kind of knowledge?! |
August 13th, 2011 at 4:25am EST Rating:  |
