From: "Redsponger" <redsponger@xxxxxxxxx>
To: "List for Photo/Imaging Educators - Professionals - Students"
<photoforum@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Wednesday, October 17, 2007 12:28 AM
: Re: irfanview update
: Karl - have you had the opportunity to use this
: freeware much?
: Thanks
: Barbara
Yes, often. it's a mainstay gross image editor for me, and one I sing the
praise of whenever I get the opportunity .. which you've given me :)
What I mean by gross editor is that it's not very functional for altering
individual elements within an image but for altering the whole image it's
not just fast but consistent and uses some very advanced algorithms
but it's main strength lies in batch processing :)
for example regarding speed, I did a little benchmarking test*
I took a folder with 50 jpeg files (85Mb) and batch processed them with the
following processes *all at once*:
1. rename to "image (advance number by one each time) + original filename
(so "8066.jpg" becomes "image1_8066.jpg")
2. resize long edge to 800 pixels (it finds the long edge & makes
800x600's)
(resizing is done by resampling using B-Spline algorithm)
3. Rotate the image 90 degrees left
4. sharpen 5%
5. adjust contrast +5%
6. adjust gamma 5%
7. adjust colour balance +Red 5
8. Add overlay text (© Karl Shah-Jenner 2007)
9. Create subdirectory and place the resulting files in that
10. Save as jpeg 90%
it took 37 seconds to process them
Doing exactly the same again but this time with the full Pentax PEF raw
files (496Mb)
took 38 seconds
doing it again but saving the output as TIF rather than jpeg, took 37
seconds - that's almost half a gig of images done in under a minute (!)
Created thumbnail contact sheets - irfanview took 496Mb of RAW's and
created a 3000x2400 pixel (10x8 at print res) jpeg contact sheet, 100% jpeg
quality of all 50 images in 16 seconds
I then made a slideshow for our mythical test customer, processing all 50
RAW files (496Mb of data) to a 27Mb executable screensaver in 40 seconds.
Now if I were a pro trying to save time (and thus money) I'd be doing my
fiddling with individual elements of an image in photoshop and doing all
the gross imge editing with irfanview.
Using the thumbnail viewer also makes this easy - you can thumbnail preview
all the images in a matter of seconds at whatever size you like, select all
the images to be rotated left or right and rotate them almost instantly.
Better still if you are working with jpegs, you can rotate them LOSSLESSLY.
Select the ones which clearly need similar processing (say adjust gamma)
and process them, move one
more
it's resizing algorithms are not just good, they're *very* good- The
b-spline and lanczos alg's are a massive
improvement over the simpler algorithms photoshop includes, and it's free
and **HEAPS** faster. in fact Irfanview beat Genuine Fractals in a UK
magazine roundup of upsizing programs for both speed and final result - not
bad, a freeware program beating rather expensive photoshop plugin
a basic primer on algorithm for resizing can be found here:
http://www.interpolatethis.com/interp.html
and some comparisons
http://www.cambridgeincolour.com/tutorials/image-resize-for-web.htm
http://www.cambridgeincolour.com/tutorials/digital-photo-enlargement.htm
Superficially irfanview looks like an ugly, clunky image editor but once
you spend a few minutes learning what it can do either by using one of the
tutorials or by experimenting you'll see it can shave hours off the normal
workflow.
as a file handler:
If you're prepared to burrow deeper still into what this odd little program
can do. you'll find it can run in DOS as a *.bat file using various
command switches. Let's say you have a card reader that you grab your
images from
let's say you also set up a file on your PC where you normally dump files
before processing them
..and another file you print from
using notepad you can write a file that uses irfanview at the command level
to copy all the images from your card to this 'dump' file, delete the
originals on the card and format the card, makes a thumbnail contact sheet
for you and resizes the images into a subdirectory for quick evaluation,
renaming these with the current date and prefix 'preview' if you so
choose.. and if you like, printing the contact sheet. Writing this notepad
file is simple and it's saved to somewhere like your desktop and called
'image dump.bat' - so whenever you pop a card in the reader you double
click the mage dump.bat' and in no time out of your printer pops a contact
sheet, your images are saved to the 'dump' file, previews are created and
your card is ready for use again :)
An example of this in the real world. Pentax Australia was trying to get
into the hospitals in medical printing from endoscopic examinations, they
wanted to sell endoscopes. Sony had this wrapped up at the time with their
expensive printers integral to their own endoscopes - the doctor only
needed to click a button on the endoscope interface/printer and out popped
a grainy 3 1/2 inch image. But the doctors were hoping for something a
little nicer, some sort of image that could be around 5x7 - 8x10 in glossy
paper they could show around at conferences and the like.
the Pentax representative had been to all the pro printers and the imaging
experts, they'd consulted industry and medical photographers and it was not
looking good for them. I spent 20 minutes with a canon printer and notepad
then took the whole lot around to them with irfanview loaded on a USB stick
(it'll actually run from a floppy disk ;)
two BAT files. One called 'grab.bat' to 'grab' the image and store it in a
folder, also processing an upsizing the image, colour correcting,
sharpening and increasing saturation and *copying* the final results into
two other folders labelled 'print8x10.bat' and print '5x7.bat'. all they
needed to do was click the icon and they had the image looking a *lot*
nicer than they'd experienced before
clicking 'print 8x10.bat' fired up the printer and printed the contents of
the folder as 8x10's
etc..
the deal was done, solved, contracted, money changed hands and happy
doctors had big glossy pics of internal organs to make them smile <gak>
* from above - I did do some speed tests against photoshop 5.5 some time
back on my older slower machine and creating a contact sheet in photoshop
was a joke in comparison - irfanview took 1min, 18 seconds to process 1500
images and produce the sheets, photoshop in the same time had only managed
56 images of the whole, effectively photoshop would have taken 35 minutes
to do the job. I have yet to speed test the latest versions of photoshop,
and I really should do it with some larger files, but this will come later
..
When it comes to workflow there seems to be an aversion to moving from
program to program, but if you can save an hour here or there and the
results are *better* than doing everything inside the one program, why not
do it?
Summing up the above - if I were to need to run the processes above on say
1000 selected images instead of 50 .. that's 10 gigabytes of raw files - I
could have used the thumbnail preview to select and rotated the necessary
ones, colour corrected, resized for the customer, added copyright info,
sharpened and adjusted gamma and contrast, created a slideshow, created a
contact sheet and printed it. the time? a little over 30 minutes.
If I wanted to individually manipulate elements of the image I'd do each
individual image in photoshop but leave the colour correcting, sharpening,
and other gross image edits alone and drop the finished images into a
folder, execute a few bat files and sit outside with a coffee until the job
was done - in fact, irfanview can even burn the images and slideshow to a
CD..
so picture the pro, edits in PS, drops all to a folder, inserts CS, selects
the images desired for printing and pops them in a print folder, runs a few
bat files and comes back to a CD, contact sheets, a few nice prints and the
work done.
like I said though, on the surface it looks an ugly little pig and
excessively simple. Some of the features are buried in odd places so
asking questions usually helps get you the results you desire and the
tutorials are a great benefit
karl
singing (yet again) the praise of a powerful little free program
