The world’s best graphics utility?
Written by Writer on Friday, October 3rd, 2008
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The world’s best graphics utility?
IrfanView is one of the few programs I can think of that 99.9 per cent of computer geeks not only have, but consider necessary. And the other 0.01 per cent forgot to install it when they reformatted their hard drive last weekend.
For those who haven’t heard of it, IrfanView is basically a graphics viewer, meaning you use it mostly to load and look at one or many photos such as when you first take them off your camera (IrfanView will do that for you) or sort them to take to the shop for printing.
Over the past 12 years, however, developer Irfan Skiljan has spent what must have been thousands of hours honing and updating and developing his program to the point where it is not just a nice little program - less than half a megabyte on your disk.
An almost unadvertised detail of the feature-rich IrfanView is to clear up red-eye from close-up photos.
Without doubt, today’s Ver 4.20 is one of the smoothest, feature-rich general graphics programs at any price. And it’s free.
The program, as I say, is built on a viewer, so it takes any folder full of photos and lets you view all of them in small size, and the current one any size you want up to full screen.
One of its basic features, however, is just how many different types of files it will work on. It takes an entire web page to list the photo and graphics formats alone, including RAW and some you haven’t heard of, guaranteed. It also imports and plays sounds and video - MP3s and AVI, sure, but also Au from Sun, MP4 from Apple and the old RA from Real Player days of yore.
It also does basic editing chores - more than most people would even want. It will crop and resize, of course, and make photos sharper and softer and blurred.
But it has more little features and “how about thats” than any competing program, including old Thailand favourites like ACDSee, for which you’ll pay big money to use legally.
Many come in plug-ins that add even more formats and players, read text, show Flash, make icons, burn Nero DVDs… Others are added by Irfan himself, often with little notice, like the red-eye correction I found recently.
IrfanView is available at (irfanview.net) not .com, and I recommend you get all the plug-ins at the same time.
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