IrfanView Class 1 notes

IrfanView tutorials.

IrfanView is a very fast, small, compact and innovative FREEWARE (for non-commercial use) graphic viewer for Windows 9x/ME/NT/2000/XP. It is available for download at http://www.irfanview.com/.

IrfanView Class 4

CONTACT SHEET

Create new directory

Create a new directory under Desktop\digital darkroom class\pictures. Do this by right clicking on the pictures directory, and selecting Create Subfolder:

Type your name and click on the OK button:

Copy files

Now go through all of the pictures you have in the Digital Darkroom Class folder and subfolders, and copy across 9 of your favourites into your new directory. Remember that to copy, you just drag the thumbnail into the new folder.

Edit and save

Go into this new directory, and do any editing you wish to these pictures, eg rotating, cropping, red-eye removal, converting to black and white, adjusting the colour balances. For each picture, when you’ve made the adjustments, save it as a TIF file. This is done so that you have a good quality non-compressed original picture to work from later. Remember that jpeg files lose quality each time you save them.

Saving as a TIF file:

Select Save from the File menu (shortcut – press S on the keyboard)
Click in the Save As Type field, and select TIF from the drop down menu (it’s the last one on the list)
If there is already a file called that, give it a different name.

Make sure it is saving in the correct directory:

If it is not showing the correct directory, you will need to click in the Save In box and navigate to the directory you created. If it doesn’t show your directory, you may have to go up a level before going back down to your directory. Eg in this example, it was in the animals directory. So I click on the directory above it:

And now it shows me all of the directories within pictures, and I can double click on my new directory to select it:

Deleting duplicates

You will now have two copies of each picture that you edited. If you can’t see the duplicates, press the F5 key on the keyboard (above the numbers along the top) to refresh the directory.

Delete a duplicate by clicking on its thumbnail (just once, to select it), and clicking the Delete key on the keyboard. You can select more than one file to delete by holding down the Ctrl key on the keyboard as you click on each one you want to delete, then clicking the Delete key on the keyboard.

You will be asked to confirm the delete(s), click on the Yes button:

Creating a contact sheet

A contact sheet is a printout of thumbnails of all the files in a directory.

You should now have 9 pictures in the directory of your name. Bring up that directory in the thumbnail browser, and select all of the pictures in that directory by using the shortcut Ctrl-A (hold down the Ctrl key and tap the A key on the keyboard).

Go to the file menu and select “Create contact sheet from selected thumbs”.

A Create Contact Sheet box will come up. You will need to change the Width, Height, Columns, Rows and Thumbnail Spacing values to those shown below.

Now click on the Choose button next to the Font field (below the Headnote field), and change it to Arial, Size 12.

Also change the colour to Black by clicking in that field and selecting black from the drop down menu.

Press on the OK button:

Click on the Create button, and you’ll end up with a picture consisting of the thumbnails like the following:

Print

Save the file if you wish. Now go to the File menu and select print (shortcut: Ctrl-P). Type your name into the Headnote field, then click on the Print button:

WEB GALLERY

To create a web gallery of these pictures, we first need to prepare the pictures so that they are the correct dimensions for a web page.

Resizing pictures for the web

Create a new folder, under the one you created, called “for web” (refer to previous instructions about creating a new folder in IrfanView).

Do the following to each of the pictures in the folder of your name:

Open it
Go to the Image menu and select Resize/Resample (shortcut: Ctrl-R)
If it is a portrait (tall) picture, and the height is greater than 400 pixels, enter 400 in the height box
If it is a landscape (wide) picture and the width is greater than 400, enter 400 in the width box
(this is to resize large pictures down to 400 pixels maximum height or width (whichever is greater), but leaves alone the smaller pictures, as enlarging them will reduce their quality).
Press S (for save), and navigate to the “for web” directory, and save it as a jpg with quality of 80.

Go back to the thumbnail file browser view, and look in the directory called “for web”. If you can’t see it, press F5 to refresh the directory.

Hover the mouse over each thumbnail and check the yellow box that pops up to see that the width and height are no greater than 400 pixels.

Creating a web gallery

Create a new folder, under the “for web” folder, called “your name’s pictures” (replace “your name’s” with your name). Eg “Katharine’s pictures”

Select all of the pictures in the “for web” folder using the shortcut Ctrl-A.

Go to the File menu and select “Save selected thumbs as HTML file”.

Click the browse button in the box that comes up:

Navigate to the “your name’s pictures” folder and then click the OK button:

Type a new page title using your name:

Click the Export button.

Viewing your web gallery

Close IrfanView and open Internet Explorer (there should be an icon on the desktop.

Go to the File menu and select Open.

Click the Browse button and navigate to the “your name’s pictures” folder. As it is within a folder on the desktop, as a shortcut to getting to it, select the Desktop icon on the left, and then drill down to folder you’re aiming for:

Click the Thumbnails.htm file and then click the Open button (Shortcut: just double click on the Thumbnails.html file).

Another box will come up, click on the OK button.

You will see your page of thumbnails come up in the browser:

Click on the first picture, and a large version of it will come up:

Click on the next link at the top right of the page to go to the next picture, and keep clicking on it to continue moving through the pictures.

At any time you can press on the Thumbnails link at the bottom of the page to return to the Thumbnails page.

Upload to a website (assuming you have webspace and have the ftp and login details)

Open Internet Explorer and enter the ftp address of your website address eg:

ftp://members.optusnet.com.au

It will ask for user name and password. Type them in.

Go to the File menu and select New Folder

Type in your name.

Double click on the new folder so that you open it.

Minimise Internet Explorer (without closing it) and open Windows Explorer.

Navigate to the “your name’s pictures” folder .

Select all the files (Ctrl-A).

Copy them (Ctrl-C).

Go back to Internet Explorer by clicking on it in the taskbar at the bottom of the screen.

Paste all of the pictures (Ctrl-V)

Now if you go to the website address (be careful of upper and lower case characters), eg:

http://members.optushome.com.au/katharinehomepage/Katharine/Thumbnails.html, your web gallery is now online!

ADDITIONAL NOTES

Directories and subdirectories

This works in both the IrfanView thumbnail file browser view and in Internet Explorer.

To view a subdirectory, either double click on the directory above it, or click on the tiny little plus sign(+) to the left of it. If a directory has a minus sign next to it (+), it means it has subdirectories which are hidden. If there is no plus sign next to it, there are no subdirectories.

Creating a subdirectory

Before creating a subdirectory, you have to select the directory you’re creating it under. So first left click on it once to select it, and then right click and select “create subfolder”.