TheRightPic.com

Irfanview is a freeware (for personal use) image editor that has quite a powerful list of features. What I like best about it is that it makes simple photo editing very fast. Here is a picture of Daphne and Mark Miller, two of the contributors to the site:

The photo has a red tint to it thanks to the camera man (myself) being an idiot, well not adjusting for the lighting in the room anyway. It is also has too much color, in my opinion.

So, I want to edit it. Nothing too serious, just fix these things.

I could fire up Photoshop but with Irfanview I think these things are easier to fix in some cases.

I have Irfanview set as my default editor so I just double click the photo and open it. The Image menu at the top of the file window is the easiest way to adjust things. For what I want to do I click on Image > Enhance Colors.

To get the look I want with this picture I use the sliders to adjust the red down until the preview area starts looking the way I want it. This makes the picture look a little dark so I bump up the Gamma Correction ever so slightly. A little goes a long way with this. If you do too much your picture will start to look washed out.

The last thing I do is decrease the saturation of the picture. Now the picture looks like this:

It is a little blurry. With most of the photos I do this with I am done at this point. I might lighten the photo up more in this case since Mark’s face is still pretty dark.

With this one I will try and sharpen it since it is a little blurry. To sharpen photos you can use the generic Sharpen option on the Image menu or you can open up the Effects Browser, which is also accessed from the Image menu. Once here you can do all sorts of things to the photo. I used the Unsharp Mask and applied it to the finished photo:

Good enough for 800×600. There are a lot of other effects and things you can do with your photos using the Effects Browser. If you try something and don’t like it you can undo by pressing CTRL+Z. Once you are done save the photo and move on. Quick and powerful.

Irfanview is available at: www.irfanview.com If you like it please consider making a donation to Irfan Skiljan, the creator.

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