Image Manipulation

[Glenn 'Stinky' Stankevicius]

Just wanted to offer some advice/tips when it comes to image capture and manipulation for images to post on this site.

First up a great easy and FREE tool is IrfanView -
http://www.irfanview.com/

Not only can you manipulate your images, it also has a slideshow feature.

Second, it has a crop feature that allows you to cut out all the wasted space left over from the scanner, just put a box around the stuff you want to keep and hit "Edit" then "Crop".

Thirdly, there is a resize tool which you can cut down the huge piccies to a more display friendly size. I would suggest 640x480 ish but RET would probably have a better idea.

There are plenty of other programs out there, just look around. One of the best places to go looking for free stuff is NoNags - http://www.nonags.com/mirrors.html

This site lists all the free software and there are no annoying pop up reminders to register or buy (hence the name nonags).

[RET]

As stated elsewhere, limiting images to 400 pixels wide keeps them from screwing up the layout of the forum.

When using PhotoShop (as many here do), I've found the best approach is to do whatever cropping or enhancing you want to the image at its largest, and save it as a PSD file for posterity.  When you've finished editing it and have it ready for posting, choose "Save for Web..." from the File menu.  This gives you a single window where you can choose the output size, JPEG quality and compare different quality levels easily.  It also estimates the picture size for you as you go so you can adjust the quality or size to keep under the 64Kb maximum.

You can use the same window to easily resize images from your digital camera as well.

cheers
RET

[FC0058]

Thanks for the info on saving for the web, I have spent hours ginning around making photo's smaller so I could post them.

[fcvan]

So that's how you do it.  I'm glad someone has shared that info.  The next photo's I put up shouldn't have the extra white under photo.   I only just managed to get the photos up last time so I was happy with a bit of white underneath!

miikael