Digital Photographer's Software Guide - Bertemes - Net

the use of Events, a feature that enables you to group photos chronologically. Being able
to copy photo adjustments from one image to another was also hailed as improving the
product’s ease-of-use. Users who like to print their photographs were given extended facilities,
including multi-picture layout. However, iPhoto remains a consumer product, useful
for many Mac users but not highly appealing to serious photographers.
Version: iPhoto ’08 (2008)
OS: Mac OS X 10.5
RAM: 256MB
Supported file formats: Major RAW formats; major image formats
Price level: Complete iLife suite approx. $80
Address: Apple Inc., 1 Infinite Loop, Cupertino, CA 95014, United States
www.apple.com
IrfanView
Developer: Irfan Skiljan
Purpose: Small, fast graphic viewer with a reputation for innovation
Chapter 2 ■ Image Viewers 17
Description
IrfanView (pronounced “ear-fan view”) has long had a great reputation among photographers
for being a fast, lightweight image viewer, with IPTC editing and an excellent
range of innovative features. It was the world’s first viewer to offer animated GIF
support. Limited editing facilities include sharpen, blur, rotate, and crop. There are good
file searching features, an email option, a multimedia player, and lots of shortcuts to
speed the workflow. All its features are carefully explained on the developer’s Website.
IrfanView supports plug-ins to add multimedia players, filters, email, Exif, and FTP, all
of which can be downloaded as a single file.
Comments
Irfan Skiljan says he has had 49,000 emails congratulating him on IrfanView, software
he continues to develop and improve. With “a million downloads per month” since
2003, it is one of the most popular pieces of photo-related software around. Its interface
is unusual in that it adjusts the window size to the size of the images, displaying
them on your desktop as large as possible.
With version 4.1, IrfanView offered a new plug-in called Paint, which lets users paint
lines, circles, and arrows, and straighten images. Dozens of other effects and improvements
have also been added, many of them courtesy of third-party enthusiasts. For
example, it now includes “green- and yellow-eye” reduction, useful in animal photography,
and a lossless JPEG crop facility.