Free Image Editor
Hello gang, the Computer Deconfuser here. This week's tip is
a download. It's a bit of free software that I've been
using for years and I absolutely love it. And with all you
digital camera owners out there this will come in handy in
resizing those high quality images. It's a program that
allows you to do quick image editing. There are loads of
features, many of which you may never use and that's ok, at
only 856Kb in size even a dial-up user can download it in no
time. The program is called Irfanview pronounced er-fan-view and
the developer's website can be found at
"http://irfanview.tuwien.ac.at/" target="_new">http://irfanview.tuwien.ac.at/.
I found it after much searching on the internet around 6 years
ago for a free program that would do a great job of touching-up
and resizing images. I finally found what I was looking for in
this little gem of a program. The coolest feature of the program
is it's ability to quickly resize an image. Just go to
Image->Resize and there are several options there. The one I
usually use is the “Half” feature. Choosing this will
keep your image proportional. This is important if you're
ever going to publish or share it on the web. A program like this
is nice because cameras are now capable of taking high quality
digital images at very high resolutions. Great for printing, bad
for the web, email, and storage. The high quality images take up
a great deal of space and can get very large. Resizing them
allows you to to share your pictures with friends around the
world with out choking their bandwidth or filling up their inbox.
A good resolution for the web or email is somewhere around 640 X
480 pixels. You can use the “Half” button several
times in order to get it close to this recommendation. Once
there, carefully save it as a different name as not to write over
top of your original.
One other nice feature is Irfanview's ability to download the
images directly from your camera, webcam, or scanner. Any imaging
device that your computer recognizes, it can grab the desired
images without the need of opening another program. It's as
simple as doing a Ctrl+A (Acquire) and selecting the image
source.
Irfanview isn't limited to just resizing images however. It
can also do red-eye reduction, sepia, sharpen, crop, panorama,
and many effects that you can apply to your images.
I hope you give it a try. This program has really matured over
the years, yet it remains free. And we like free. Enjoy.
Please send your comments, questions, or suggestions to:
comments@deconfuser.com
PO BOX 987
North Wilkesboro, NC 28659
