GRAPHICS
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GRAPHICS |
Any black & white or color photograph (up to about 8.5"x14") can be scanned to use on your Internet page or emailed to your friends. For posting images on the Internet, a resolution of72-75dpi (dots per inch) creates a small file size so that your page downloads quickly for the Internet viewing public. This dpi is also the highest resolution that your computer monitor is probably capable of displaying. The JPEG format is the most common on the Net, but can cause a degree of cumulative image degradation each time you read and write a JPEG image. To preserve the quality of your graphics, use a non-lossy format like PNG to store images, and only write your pictures to JPEG when you require highly compressed graphic files. IrfanView is a 32-Bit Graphic Viewer for Windoze95/98 and Windows NT- with Multiple (animated) GIF support and Multipage TIFF support that allows re-sizing of images. IrfanView is a very fast FREEWARE (for non-commercial use). Graphics Workshop, written by Steve Rimmer, is helpful for managing and converting your images and photos, and it is a Shareware program. The program also offers many useful graphics tips. Since it is feature-rich it serves well as an example of this type of program. For instance, the moiré patterns produced by scanning screen graphics from books and magazines can be reduced or eliminated with the Filters function in View mode. Soften and then sharpen a graphic with moiré patterns to reduce their visibility. Some downloaded graphic files with the extension JPG are really Johnson-Grace ART files. If you have trouble reading downloaded images as JPEG images, try renaming them to have the extension ART. If a file is named incorrectly, the Mystery File Identifier in the File menu of Graphic Workshop will fix it. Graphic Workshop can also convert most image formats, including converting images to BMP and automatically set them up as Windows wallpaper. Just select Wallppr as the destination format when you convert or otherwise process an image. You can't easily convert directly from JPEG to GIF because JPEG graphics support more colors than GIF files. A good graphics program offers Clipboard file destination to the Windows clipboard. If you choose this as a destination format, the image that would normally have been written to a graphic file will be copied directly to the Windows clipboard, ready to paste into another application. Also you should be able to copy files between browser windows by dragging them. You can create a browser window for each directory on your hard drive where you normally work with graphics. You can leave the ones you aren't using right now minimized. Select New Browser from the File menu to create a new browser window. A Caption adds a few lines of text to your graphics. If you want to create captions with text from a file, rather than from the edit field in the Caption dialog, enter an @ sign followed by the path to a text file in the Caption dialog. Graphic Workshop offers a variety of options to add comment blocks to files which support them. You can be prompted to enter text, have text entered automatically for all files or have specific comment text added for each file name. See the Setup dialog to configure how file comments should be managed. The Details option will let you peek at the internal structure of selected file formats. Use this tool to locate hidden text messages and copyright information in graphic files. Dithering reduces photo realistic images to black and white graphics can be FAXed without degradation, and make eye-catching FAX cover pages. Also, if you're creating a word processing document or desktop publishing project which will be output to a black and white device, use the Graphic Workshop effects function to convert your images to grey scale. Doing so will result in smaller final document files and faster output. Select Print With Scaling and Scale to Fill Page to fit your graphic to the paper you're printing on. The Scale function is good for creating web page thumbnails. Select By Size and Maintain Aspect Ratio. Use small target dimensions -- 128 by 128 is a good choice. If you hold down the Shift key and click on the Thumbnail button, thumbnails will be added to all the selected files in your current browser window. This is equivalent to selecting Add Thumbnails from the Thumbnail menu. The Add Thumbnails Where Required item of the Thumbnail menu will add thumbnails to graphics which don't currently have them, but ignore any files that do. Use this feature to quickly update a directory of files -- just tag all and select Add Thumbnails Where Required. You may be able to have your collection of graphics printed out with multiple images per page, along the lines of a photographic contact sheet. The file delete function can optionally send deleted files to the Windows Recycle Bin. Check the recycle bin frequently if you enable this function -- graphics are often very large files, and can occupy a lot of space while they wait for you to empty the trash. Use the Formats dialog in the File menu to disable file formats you don't need. Doing so will make your browser windows easier to navigate and help Graphic Workshop boot up quicker. The Graphic Workshop EXE picture feature can create instant slide shows of your pictures, suitable for distribution on a floppy disk or by e-mail. EXE pictures can be viewed without any additional software. Enable Password Protected PNG Files in Setup to keep your graphics secure. See the Graphic Workshop documentation for more about this feature. The Acquire function is intended to acquire images from scanners, but it will drive any device with a fully compliant TWAIN interface. This includes most digital cameras. Graphic Workshop will preview TrueType fonts so you can see what they look like before you install them. Just double-click on any TTF file. Check out Alchemy Mindworks Font Wrangler software for a convenient way to install, remove, browse and manage all your TrueType fonts. It's at our web page. Progressive JPEG files are useful in web browsers, but most other applications which import JPEG files can't read them. Make sure the Write Progress JPEG switch in Setup is off unless you're sure you need progressive JPEG files. Kodak Photo-CDs contain multiple resolutions of each stored image. If you need a higher or lower resolution image that the one which is initially read from a Photo-CD files, open the Graphic Workshop Professional Setup dialog and select a different Photo-CD Options setting. If you convert animation from another format to AVI, keep in mind that AVI files, like JPEG files, achieve better compression by allowing a degree of image degradation. This value can be set as the AVI quality factor in the Graphic Workshop Setup dialog -- increase it to create more attractive AVI files. While Windows WAV audio files and MIDI sequenced music files aren't really graphics, you can still browse them with Graphic Workshop. If you attempt to View one, you'll see a canned thumbnail image and the file's audio will play. Look in \WINDOWS\MEDIA for some example WAV audio files. Need to match one or more graphics to the palette of an existing graphic file? Use the remap feature of the Effects function and use the Select button to retrieve the palette from the file to be matched to. If you are uncertain about the current screen driver settings for your system, open the System Information dialog in the Help menu. If you'd like to be notified automatically whenever new Alchemy Mindworks software or updates are available, visit the web page and add your address to the E-mail Update List. SlowView is an amaising freeware program. It is an image viewer, optimized for loading and displaying images as fast as possible; has a built in ThumbNailer that doesn't clutter your folders; converts your Images to other formats; supports well known and very rare image formats such as DirectDraw TextureSurfaces (*.dds); and it has a slideshow mode. With SlowView you can also manipulate images in various ways including: color changes, cut and paste, rotate, zoom and resize, and even display images as a tilemap. It is easily to acquire (335K download) and runs without even being installed! A musthave program if you have lots of images to navigate and sort. Picture Slide Show is a FREEWARE simple program that continuously displays all the pictures in a folder. You can tell it which folder to look at and how long to display a picture for (allows PCs to go into standby mode); change background colour, and use command line startup options like sort pictures before displaying, including real randomness (all images are randomly displayed before they're shown again). Support for ICO, BMP, EMF, GIF, JPG, PNG, and WMF graphic formats. Some other useful shareware and freeware graphics programs are: I-view32; Batch Thumbs; and L-view pro.
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