My server is working hard while I sleep tonight, because I've decided to spruce up all my thumbnail images. This is something I've been considering for a while, but I liked the purity of just scaling down the raw images, and having all post-processing be human controlled.

But as of this evening, the medium and original pictures (always available by clicking through) will remain unmodified, while the thumb and tiny sizes have been regenerated using "-normalize -unsharp 3" as arguments to ImageMagick's convert command.

Here is what an example thumbnail looks like with each of the options and cumulatively (I'm also taking this opportunity to size them up from around 240x160 to around 360x240):

	not normalized	-normalize
not sharpened
-unsharp 3

And if you think the tiny size (currently around 36x24) is too small to benefit, check it out:

	reg	-normalize
not sharpened
-unsharp 3

Obviously, the browser-sized mediums would benefit the most from this, but that's a lot of processing time to commit, so I'm going to wait and see if there are any thumbs that look awful. If I find some, I'll try this process on their medium sizes and see what I think. I suspect it will turn out that I can unsharp everything, and normalizing can be the rule, with some exceptions.

And for the record, I know that Histogram Equalization (-equalize) is more sophisticated than Contrast Stretching (-normalize), but I got some strange results with the former.

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