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Team Digit / 44
When it comes to image manipulation, nothing beats IrfanView, This tiny and light freeware application uses negligible system resources, is fast and has a gazillion options to help you manipulate images. It can also do basic touchups to your images, apart from the regular resizing and Web compression that it is most popularly used for! Let’s see what exactly is possible with this little wonder software. You can find the installer for IrfanView on every month’s Digit CD under the Digital Tools > Essentials section.
Fullscreen Control
This one’s easy, just press [Enter] after you open an image. You can use the right arrow key or the space bar to go to the next image in the directory, and the left arrow key to see the previous image. However, what is interesting is that if your images are rather dark, they will end up blending into the default black background that IrfanView uses. Instead of settling for this black background, you can choose another colour. Go to Options > Properties (or just press [P]) and then click on the “Full Screen” tab. Here you will see the option for Screen Color. Just click on the colour and select something from the palette that pops up.
Batch Conversion
What if you have 6000 images you want to resize? Some of these are portrait and some landscape, some are BMPs, some are TIFFs and some JPGs? If you sit down to resize/resample each image individually, it will take you forever. Instead, open the first image in the folder, then press [B]. Now you will see the “Batch conversion” dialog box pop up. Just select all the images from that folder and click on Add (or just click on "Add all").
Now it’s time to see the resize/resample options that will help IrfanView automatically resize your images. Look for the “Use advanced options” checkbox and tick it. now click on the Set advanced options button. In order to resize proportionately, again, make sure the Preserve aspect ratio checkbox is ticked. Now click on the Resize checkbox and then select the option to either set longer or shorter side to whatever size you want. This is helpful because you might have portraits mixed with landscapes...
Also remember to look at the JPG options, to make sure that everything is fine. Next, you should look at the path in which IrfanView is saving the resized images. The best way we’ve found is to click on the “Use this directory as output” button, and then add some folder name to the Output directory path (“resized” or “smaller” is what we prefer to call the new folder). After all this, just click on Start and watch in amazement how IrfanView goes about mercilessly reducing image sizes!
Format Conversion
Very often we find ourselves stuck with BMP or TIFF images, which we may want to upload to the Web. Now these files are generally large, and for screen rendering (images on Web sites) no one needs anything higher in quality than JPEG. So instead of uploading a 1 MB image of your vacation, do everyone in your mailing list a favour and covert it to a more manageable JPEG. All you need to do is press [S] and the “Save Picture As...” dialog box pops up. Select the directory you want to save it to, the Save quality (compression level) — 70 per cent should be fine — and even save as a progressive JPG. You may have seen such pictures online, where the whole picture appears, blurry at first and then clears up, instead of slowly displaying a line at a time from the top down.
Resizing and Resampling
With all the 5 megapixel (or higher) digital cameras around the place, everyone seems to be taking really high resolution images of everything from vacation spots to family gatherings, and even their pets. Now if you’re one of these shutter-bugs, and always click at the highest resolution setting for your camera, you probably have a lot of images stored that exceed 1 MB in size and have greater resolutions than 1600x1200. Considering that the standard Desktop has a resolution of just 1024x768 (0.8 mega pixel), and most sites are designed with this resolution in mind, uploading the complete 5 megapixel image to your photo gallery is rather pointless. Do the visitors to your site really have to see how many wrinkles your grandmother has on the tip of her nose? The first thing you should do is resize your images, before you even think of uploading them. In IrfanView this is easy. Just press [Ctrl] + [R] to get to the “Resize/Resample image” dialog box. Here, you can change the image resolution, but make sure you tick the Preserve aspect ratio check box so that you do not distort the image. Choose a saner size, even 800x600 is more than enough for any Web page, and make sure you set the DPI (dots per inch) to 72 — displaying an image on screen (for the Web) needs nothing more than 72 DPI. Also remember to make sure that the option to Resample is selected instead of Resize, because Resampling the image will provide better quality. Once you're satisfied with the right size, just press [S] to Save As... or [Ctrl] + [S] to overwrite the original.
Easy Screenshots
A lot of people out there need to take screenshots on a regular basis — to post content online, show an expert for help with troubleshooting, explain solutions (if they’re the expert), for blog posts, etc. Most of us just press [Print Screen] and then paste into an image editing program such as MS Paint or Adobe Photoshop. IrfanView, however, can make this task easy: just start IrfanView, press [C] and you should see the Capture Setup dialog box. Here you can choose a hot key for screen capture, where to save the captured file and even what format to save it in. No more hassles taking screenshots!
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