Irfanview V4.62

[Terina]

Iusually use IrfanView v4.62 to decrease colour depth for PNG images to 4 bits per pixel. But I now need to use ImageMagick v7 because I need to cron a batch job on Linux (CentOS 7.9). IrfanView doesn't run on Linux (except on Wine, which is not feasible for me).

IrfanView is a viewer for a wide variety of image, audio and video formats. The program includes batch processing, creation of panoramic images, edition of multi-page TIFF files, lossless JPEG rotate/crop and effects such as sharpen and blur. Other tools such as screen capture, scanner, slideshow, plugin support and ability to capture icons from EXE or DLL.

Alternatively, IrfanView Portable is also available and updates drive letters and handles registry keys.

Starting from ver. 4.67.2, the new OCR plugin can read QR Codes and Barcodes by itself, without any Tesseract.

Just get the latest version from the Plugins page, under "PlugIns updated after the version 4.67:".

I notice in 4.67 that the OCR plugin is updated. It suggests using the Tesseract OCR, which I suspect is not portable. When I test it I will be looking to see if it can be made portable, and if it works with 32-bit Irfanview (there are a number of limitations with the 64-bit Irfanview so I am staying there).

Also note that virtually every new release updates some plugins, and version 4.65 is no exception. Most users may want to go to and download the 32- or 64-bit package, and dump them into the Irfanview Plugins subdirectory.

Just to note that the direct download links point to version 4.60. The home website (www.irfanview.com) has the link to version 4.62 Irfanview and the plugins. Note that there is no 32-bit Irfanview in zip format, but I verified that uniextract works.

Note: New features in this version, especially if you use the Irfanview PlugIn

The PDF Plugin is great! So far, I have converted PDFs to images, and vice-versa, stiched together and split PDFs (one colleague had a poster-sized image composed of 14 pages), and more. It can also do thumbnails.

Using only Irfanview with the PDF Plugin, for example, I went to archive.org, used Irfanview's fixed screen rectangle capture to 'scan' and old book direct to PDF, and clean up the yellowed pages.

While PDF-XChange Editor is still the better product for annotation, OCR, etc., I recommend looking at Irfanview for PDF.

Great Viewer.

Open and converts between most graphic formats, has some (simple, but useful) editing features, and now, even outputs (thru plugin) to PDF. Do note that joining several Bitmaps (each in a one-page PDFs) can easily be done with PDFTK Builder (also in this site). This is not minor. If one wants portability one can not rely on having PDF printer (non-portable) installed everywhere!

Many plugins were also updated in this version, so IrfanView recommends updating them if you update IrfanView itself.

"Several PlugIns are changed/updated, please install the newest versions:"

Attention! Version 4.50 changes the ini-file to unicode (UTF16 LE) - as a side-effect the dropdown-zoombox in the menu (if activated) doesn't show up the percentage-steps any more, only %%. You can still type in the desired percentage and press enter, but the predefined steps don't work. This sure will be corrected, but if someone can't live with that: stay with V4.44 until next version.

This is a great piece of software: simple to use and performs almost any task. I especially like the custom/fine rotation feature which allows you to rotate images to a fraction of a degree both right and left. The batch rename and convert feature is fantastic too. It allows you to save in any format. Like many others, I've been using it for years and highly recommend it. The plugins allow you to do almost any task with it and I'm still discovering new things I can do with every day. The help files are easy to follow and it has a nice, clean, uncluttered interface. Incredibly well designed. Great program! (Did I mention it is free?)

Best way I find to make IrfanView portable-friendly is to run a PC-installed version (with Plugins), go to Properties/Settings, under Extensions 'Clear all', then uncheck any 'Shell options'. Then copy the whole IrfanView folder to your USB drive. After doing that, re-enable the extensions and shell options on the install PC. I just drag-and-drop images into an open instance since there won't be file associations on the host machine.

For the File Associations, Shell extensions (Right-click) and other Registry issues, especially in a multi-user environment, have a look at ASSOX

Off-topic (not portable)

IrfanView's find for quick-and-dirty icons, but for making proper Windows ICO files (14 different size/resolution in one file - see -iw015.html, better to use Photoshop and the Icon Plugin from here

I've tried a lot of alternatives for years. None is as fast as IrfanView, especially in large folders with lots of files. It's the best and the only other picture viewer I use is XnView for its easier way to handle dual screens.

The normal version if portable enough, the new machine doesn't know to call the program if someone clicks on a picture - because guess what - it hasn't been associated with that program. But that's not the programs fault, there is no reason to use a separate launcher.

Is there ANY way to work around the file-associations thing? If an USB user re-sets the file associations to his "F: drive" installation this causes problems for the original owner of the PC. I realize it is a Windows thing but I hope someone has a clue to maybe solve this/workaround.

IrfanView is not stealth or even just portable when you activate file associations or shell functions. For this the exe has to be alway on the same place. On a fresh machine or if you move the app folder you need to reregister your desired file associations and of course they are written to the registry. ALL other settings are portable via ini.

I find that running it from a flash drive messes up whatever settings (eg associations and shell menu settings) were set by the Irfanview on the host's hard drive. It's overwriting settings kept by the registry! This is not safe "portable app" behavior, especially if I'm doing this on someone else's machine.

The finest light weight, speedy, simple, unencumbered, non-dependant and versitile graphics programme I have used. Had it for years and at a minimum it works great as a graphics clipboard.

The only limitation I have found is that it can't deal with large files copied and pasted from photoshop.

I'm using this baby for years for fast stuff (paintshop pro for the rest) and it is just great. Besides the ability of using photoshop plugins irfanview also creates great html image galeries, multiple image aopperations throug thumbnails an almost everything else besides serious editing.

This is all you need. I dare you to prove me wrong :-)

Can someone explain to me, why the exposure module and color picker in darktable is doing the calculation not linear and therefor not correct? Please correct me, if I am wrong or do miss something basic with my following interpretation.

In the next graphic you see a 50 % checkerboard in the background. In the foreground are two homogenously filled areas. With zoom 100 % the background should have the average intensity of 50 % and therefor roughly sRGB=186 (right side area) and not the left side value of sRGB=128.

The color picker from top to bottom does give the results:

The 2nd value of the checkerboard is the arithmetic mean, but not the perceived brightness of 186. If you zoom such image in a browser or irfanview or most other tools (inclusive darktable), the brightness of the checkerboard will change and deviate strongly from the correct average of 186. This effect is well known. Look for the good and famous article of www.ericbrasseur.org/gamma.html about gamma error in picture scaling.

Wrong gamma calculations generally give too dark results. Especially with fine bright details this is visible. This because one white pixel line and one black pixel line do NOT give sRGB=127 as perceived average, but sRGB=188, which is much brighter (50 % instead of 21 %).

To my humble opinion the arithmetic mean value of sRGB pixels is nonsense and really useless. To make it correct, you have to convert sRGB values to linear intensity, then make the arithmetic mean and then convert back from linear to nonlinear sRGB.

For a 50 % white+black checkerboard image the average sRGB value is definitively 188 and not 128 or 55 or something else. So you can not trust this color picker, regardless of profile. If the color picker does not show the correct value for checkerboard it will not show the correct values for any other mixture of any pixel colors.

For JPEG inputs, input profile does linearization. Doing an exposure adjustment on the nonlinear data before the input profile would be Bad. Even an exposure adjustment afterwards would be problematic, in a similar manner to doing exposure adjustment after filmic/sigmoid/basecurve.

thank you for the highlighting. Yes, apparently darktable 4.0.1 does not switch with PNG, but also not with JPG files automatically to the correct module order v3.0 JPEG. That is a pitty. Can this be corrected/configured somehow from the user?

And the big surprise. The sRGB color values displayed by color picker, when you move him slowly over the non moving picture 1, are exactly the visible colors of screenshot 2. These values are starting wiht 60 but near at the edge turn to 62, 46, 178, 251, 235 and finally to 238.

What the hell is going on with this color picker? Is it my PC? Is there a sharpening going on in the background, which is not visible and affects only the color picker and when you pan the picture on the screen? Can someone confirm this behavior? I am using since one hour DT v4.2.0, but the effect was identical with DT v4.0.1.

But DT is not alone with such color picker issues. For other tools including blender there are ongoing dicussions about this. I am also still searching for a simple windows color picker, which can pick more than one pixel. ColorPic v5.1 for example is quite good, but fails also with correct (linear) 3x3 or 5.5 pixel sum. Other standalone color pickers have other issues, e.g. do not work for multiple monitors.

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