[thelist] auto-image-resizing best results

[Simon Willison]

Hi all,

What method of automatically resizing photographs gives the best quality 
results? This is for automatically generating both thumbnails (quality 
not too important) and 600px wide images (very important) from high 
resolution digital photos. I've been experimenting with GD with PHP, and 
although the results it gives are adequate for producing thumbnails they 
are slightly flakey for larger images - they're not bad, but they're not 
brilliant either.

When I resize a photograph in Fireworks MX (with resample / bicubic, 
which are the default settings) the results are stunning. Does anyone 
know of a tool that can be run on a Unix server that produces a similar 
quality?

Thanks,

Simon Willison