Hello all,

Our company has used ImageMagick for many years to successfully generate
thumbnails.  Since Feb 4th of this year we have used
ImageMagick-6.4.9-2-Q16-windows-dll.exe and that has worked fine.

On Tuesday I upgraded to ImageMagick-6.5.6-10-Q16-windows-dll.exe and am now
getting complaints (from multiple customers) that our thumbnails are fuzzy.

Our actual thumbnail build process is complex & uses PerlMagick but I can
demonstrate the issue using these simple commands:

convert -size 420x420 -thumbnail 420x420 -quality 75 -colorspace RGB
-sharpen 0.1x0.2 source.jpg th420_%im_version%.jpg
convert -size 140x140 -thumbnail 140x140 -quality 75 -colorspace RGB
-sharpen 0.1x0.2 th420_%im_version%.jpg th140_%im_version%.jpg

The first creates a 420px thumbnail from the source, and the second creates
a 140px thumbnail from the 420px one.

Using ImageMagick 6.4.9-2-Q16 we get this:

http://87.252.62.61/thumb/th140_64.jpg

With ImageMagick 6.5.6-10-Q16 we get this: (fuzzier, specifically with the
girl's freckles washed out)

http://87.252.62.61/thumb/th140_65.jpg

I have copied our build script and linked to the original source image and
shown both thumbs side-by-side at
http://87.252.62.61/thumb/side_by_side.html

Is anyone able to help with this?  I have searched the changes documentation
between 6.4.9 and 6.5.6 and I do not see anything related to changes to
thumbnailing or sharpening.  I haven't seen anything on this list or in the
forum related to it.  Could it be something like I need to uppercase
"-Sharpen" now or something???

I could revert to 6.4.9-2 but I hate to go back.  Also I could find new
sharpen arguments for 6.5.6, but the ones we had took weeks to decide upon
and will affect millions of images from thousands of different
photographers/cameras and so the best option would be to make what worked
before work again.

Thanks for any help!

Also this list gave me some help back in June re: color searching and I was
asked to post back what worked and what didn't.  I used the Histogram
function to get a list of which colours existed inside the image.  I used
our 140px thumbnail and used only the center 80% of it so as to reduce the
amount of data to churn.  Then I mapped all the colours into the 216-colour
web colours (by dividing each r,g,b on 0-255 by 6 to get 0..5 and then
taking $int_colour = 36 * red + 6 * green + blue).  Then using the frequency
of those 216 colours within each image, I created a database table of
mappings and built the search here:
http://theimagefile.co.uk/?Action=_SE&padv=1 .   Originally I had used 4096
colours with some proximity-matching but the database table grew too big.
So now it uses only 216 colours and requires an exact match.  I was also
concerned about JPG colour reduction where the colours of individual pixels
were different from what is seen by the naked eye -- however somehow this
hasn't been an issue, maybe because we use the smallest 140px thumbnail as a
data source or because we simplify to 216 colours.  I had experimented with
various operators to smooth out the image colours but they didn't seem to
help, so I ended up just using the raw thumbnail.

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