Making Small Icons.

Computing & Information Services Department.
instructor: jim.cerny@unh.edu

The term "small" in this context means making graphics both visually small (iconized) and physically small (compact in bytes).

All these examples involve the famous graphic by Katsushita Hokusai in his series of views of Mt. Fuji. Hokusai painted this in the 1830s along the coast of Kanagawa.

• full size. JPEG. 98358 bytes. 800 x 533 pixels.
• direct icon. GIF. 7345 bytes.
  resized in PhotoShop to 100x67 pixels.
• enhanced icon. GIF. 4644 bytes.
  edited in PhotoShop to 100 x 85 pixels:
  • crop
  • KPT sharpen intensity
  • apply blur filter (optional but highly recommended)
  • resize to 100x85 pixels
  • unsharp mask (50%, radius=1.0, threshold=0)
  • indexed color, adaptive palette, diffusion dither, 5 bits (32 colors)
• enhanced icon as an inline 2X graphic.

PhotoShop makes it easy to see the size of a graphic (in pixels) when you have it on-screen and select Document Info from the View Menu.