[Mccoypottery-talk] Photo Munging, was: Testing new Pottery photo album

[acp]

Patti wrote:

>Yep I  know I  had to give in and   instal the dreaded  new netscape
>LOL  to  see my albums  
>

Which Netscape??  I'm using 7.02.  Did you have to install a later one??

> as for  light in my pics  many were taken in
>outdoor light  and edited   real well  some though were inside and
>cannot be  brightened  any  more then they are 
>
...snipping...

It is not the brightness, but the lightness that needs increasing and I 
realize
it may be that adding any more would wash them out..  I can't remember
the proper name of the quality I'm trying to describe (and I should, 
considering
I have a photo hobbiest background).  Darn!    It is what I adjust when
I take pics indoors, in regular room light and they turn out to be too dark.

Since several people on this list take pics of their pottery, manipulate 
and then
post the pics, I thought I'd tell you about some really neat, FREE, graphics
software.  

I use Adobe Photoshop to do anything other than rudimentary manipulation,
but for simple stuff -- like brightness, contrast, lightenss, RGB color 
balance,
resizing, cropping and rotating, I use Irfanview.   It's a free graphics 
program,
created by someone in Finland (I believe).  It has hoardes of plugins 
available,
all free.  It is downloadable from several sites.    It is small (object 
size wise)
so I can open it and manipulate photos, when I already have 15 Netscape
sessions, 3 newsreaders, one shell account session, 2 copies of MS Word,
Notepad, ISP connection, DOS prompt, Webshots, SETI Stash and all the
crap that loads at startup.  And Irfanview performs pretty fast, with 
all that
other stuff running, too.   Irfanview has a batch functiont that I just 
love;
actually can't live without.   It allows you to copy/rename/move a selection
of pics.  Likewise you can resize or adjust any other quality on a list of
image files.  

Irfanvew actually has better support and is less buggy than most of the
commercial packages out there.  ;-)  

I found this jewel thru a computer genealogy mailing list and it's the best
free program anyone has ever recommended to me.   I would think, for
people needing to resize pics to post to ebay, etc., this would be a
wonderful find, as well.

Even if you already have a favorite, overpriced, commercial photo
manipulation program (like Photoshop or something cheaper) or
something you use, which came "free" (we all know better) with
your scanner or camera, Irfanview is a great addition to your photo
munging suite.  

Being disorganized is not necessarily a bad thing -- as long as it
works for you.  I'm horribly well organized.  I just can't help it; I
was born that way.  Along with the tendency towards organization,
comes a huge helping of perfectionism.  I am pretty close to being
the pickest person on the planet and there is absolutely nothing I can
do about it.  ;-)   Believe me, I've tried.  And yes, I meditate
and am involved in all sorts of other mind control and consciousness
raising activities, but I just can't seem to attain one of my major
goals in this lifetime -- detatchment.      It is a huge pain.

:-)
acp