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 5

SLIDESHOW

There are two types of slideshows. The first is where IrfanView displays each of the pictures in a directory (or selected pictures) one at a time on the screen. The second is where an executable file (.exe) is created which will display selected pictures as a slideshow. The advantage of the second type is that you can copy just the.exe file to any computer and run the slideshow.

Be aware however, that emailing the .exe is probably not a good idea, as it could be quite a large file, plus it is recommended that people don’t run .exe files that are emailed to them due to the chance of getting viruses and spyware (yes, your file is safe, but how do they know that?). In fact a lot of ISPs (Internet Service Providers) don’t even let .exe files through, so they would get an email stripped of the attachment.

This slideshow function is accessed in the picture viewer part of IrfanView. So open up one of your pictures (or double click on the squashed cat icon on the desktop).

Go to the file menu and select Slideshow (Shortcut: W, or the Slideshow icon, second from left on the toolbar).

(1) In the box that comes up, navigate to the “for web” folder in the right pane.

(2) Click the Add all button, and the files names will appear in the left pane.

(3) Click the “Save as EXE/SCR file” button.

(There are other options here and under the Advanced options button that you can experiment with once you have the hang of it)

Then click on the Browse button and navigate to wherever you want to save the file.

Change the “Result file name” field to whatever you want to call it.

Click the Create button, and then the OK button when it comes up.

Now if you navigate through Windows Explorer to the location where you saved it, you will find a file with the name you gave it, which will run a slideshow when you double click on it.

SET AS YOUR DESKTOP WALLPAPER

If you would like to use one of your pictures as the desktop picture on your computer, simply open the picture in IrfanView, go to the Options menu, select Set as Wallpaper, and choose Centered.

If you find that the picture is too big to fit on the screen, you might like to resize the picture first (Image menu, Resize/Resample) so that it fits the screen better. The most common sizes of monitors are 800x600 pixels, and 1024x768 pixels. You don’t need to make your pictures exactly those proportions (which might squash them out of proportion anyway), just approximate, keeping the Preserve Aspect Ratio option ticked.

If the picture is quite small on the screen, you could choose the option Tiled so that it is repeated to fit the screen.

Try various options with some of your pictures to see how they look.

CHANGE TOOLBAR OPTIONS

Open one of your pictures, go to the Options menu and select Properties (shortcut - P).

Select the Misc. 3 tab.

In the Show/Hide Toolbars box, you can click on the various toolbar items to remove or add them to the toolbar.

It is recommended to remove the Delete File item, so that it can’t accidentally be clicked.

If you add the Thumbnails item, this gives you another way to get back to the thumbnails (other than clicking T), by clicking the Thumbnails icon on the toolbar.

Click the OK button.

Note that the Thumbnails item on the toolbar operates the same as clicking T – if the thumbnail file browser is already open, it actually closes it, and you need to press it again to go to it. So if it’s already open, the best way to get to it is actually to click on the Panda icon on the taskbar right at the bottom of the screen.

MORE ABOUT FILE FORMATS

TIFF ("Tagged Image File Format")
File extension: .tif

Tiff files are “lossless”, ie they don’t lose information each time you save them.

There is a setting for compression when saving Tif files, but it doesn’t actually discard any information, it just uses encoding to take up less memory to store the same information.

Tiff files tend to be large due to their lossless format.

Tiffs are commonly used for high quality printing, eg magazines and brochures, or saving pictures on your hard drive which have been manipulated.

JPEG ("Joint Photographic Experts Group")
File extension: .jpg

Jpeg files are “lossy”, ie they lose information each time you save them. You can alter how much information is lost by adjusting the compression amount, but even at high quality settings (eg 90%) you can still be losing information.

Jpeg files tend to be small due to their compression.

Jpegs are commonly used for pictures on web sites.

Digital cameras usually save files as Jpegs. There is usually a quality setting in the camera for the amount of compression and/or the size of the picture – make sure you set the quality to the highest value. Even if it means you can’t fit as many pictures on the memory card, at least it means you have the biggest and best quality possible pictures for those you want to print out at a decent size. Remember, you can always make a picture smaller, but once you lose the detail, you can’t get it back!

GIF (“Graphics Interchange Format”)
File extension: .gif

GIF files are best for pictures or graphics with blocks of colours, eg logos, headings on web pages or charts. It is limited to 256 colours, so is not suitable for photos.

The fewer different colours are used, the smaller the file size.

What format to use when?

Most digital cameras produce pictures as high quality Jpegs, which allows you to fit many photos on a memory card.

Once you have them on your computer, make sure you copy them to a backup somewhere, preferably on a CD or DVD.

Now, with the files you have on the computer, if you’re not going to do anything to a picture other than open it, look at it and perhaps print it, there’s no need to resave it in a different format, as you won’t lose any information just by opening and printing it.

If you want to make adjustments to the picture, eg rotate, crop, red-eye reduction etc, then SAVE IT AS A TIFF FILE. Otherwise, if you just save the file as a JPEG, you’ve lost the original file (except on your backup!), and even if you save it under a different name, you’re losing detail each time you open and save it.

So, once you start adjusting a picture, save it as a Tiff file.

If you are planning to use a picture for a website or emailing, continue working with it as a Tiff file, right up until you’re ready to resize it. At this point, resize it and save it as a Jpeg (using a different name to the one this file started as, otherwise you’ll overwrite it.) Once you’ve resized it, don’t resave it as a Tiff, otherwise you’ll lose resolution, which you might want if you go back to this file later.

Here’s an example of the journey of one photo

A picture of my dog, Chani, comes off my camera onto the computer, and it is called 0043434.jpg

That file, along with all the others from my digital camera that week, are backed up to a CD and put away in a cupboard.

The file 0043434.jpg on my computer is opened up. I rotate it, crop it and print it. I don’t resave it at this point, as they were just small actions and I don’t care if I have to do them again next time I open the picture up.

Later, I decide to send some pictures, including this one, off to get printed at a photo lab. I open up 0043434.jpg, rotate it, adjust some colours, sharpen it, and resave it as chani.tif. I run out of time, and decide to come back to it the next day.

The next day, I come back to the picture, and decide that I want to crop it. I do so, and save it as chani-cropped.tif. I did that so that I can come back to the uncropped file Chani.tif at a later time if I want to print the whole picture.

Now the photo lab requires jpeg files for printing. I’ve used tif up until now so that I don’t lose any detail when I save it. So I open up chani2.tif, make sure it’s the right size for printing, and save it as a jpeg file called chani-cropped-print.jpg at the highest possible quality. Remember that quality is much more an issue with printed pictures than with what we see on the screen.

Having sent that file off for printing, I decide that it is such a lovely photo, I’ll email it to a few people. But I don’t want to send the cropped version. Remember that I kept an uncropped file just in case? So I go back to the chani.tif file. It has already been rotated, sharpened and had the colours adjusted, so I don’t have to redo those things.

I resample it so that it’s no bigger than 400 pixels wide or high, and save it as a new file, chani-email.jpg with the quality set at 60%.

So I now have the following files:

0043434.jpg: the original, untouched jpg from the camera. It is on the computer and also on a CD backup.
chani.tif: Rotated, colour adjusted and sharpened.
chani-cropped.tif: same as above, but it has also been cropped.
chani-cropped-print.jpg: same as above, ready for printing at a photo lab.
chani-email.jpg: Rotated, colour adjusted and sharpened, not cropped. Resized for emailing.

It’s up to you how many of these you would want to keep, but at the very least you would keep the original 0043434.jpg (and its backup on the CD) so that you can go back to it. I tend to keep all versions, and some may even have an a, b, c etc appended to them because I keep resaving with different names as I go through the stages of manipulation, so that if something doesn’t work, I can go back a few steps and not have to go back to the original. A good example of this is if I am turning a colour photo to black and white – you can’t bring the colour back once it’s gone, so I always save just before I convert it, so I have a good point to go back to if I need to.