Digital Focus: Take Great Portraits

Dave's Favorites: Free Image Editing With IrfanView

It's free. It's easy to use. It's like digital manna from heaven. IrfanView is a labor of love from Irfan Skiljan, a graduate of the Vienna University of Technology, and it's a great little image editing program that lets you do all the basics--resizing, cropping, sharpening, changing file format--without resorting to a commercial program like Paint Shop Pro or Adobe PhotoShop Elements.

IrfanView has a simple interface. The program's features are available from easy-to-understand menus, and there are no floating control boxes or arcane tool palettes to get in the way. Want to sharpen a fuzzy image? Just choose from the menu. Need to resize your picture? A dialog box lets you choose any arbitrary size or you can click on some common dimensions.

The program has a surprising number of useful features. There's an image browser that lets you look for pictures on your hard disk by scanning thumbnails. The program is TWAIN-complaint, so you can use it to capture images from a scanner or digital camera. It even has a batch-processing mode for renaming or converting a large number of images to a new file format all at once.

IrfanView isn't perfect, of course--the program's stripped-down simplicity means you'll need a more-sophisticated program for advanced image editing. But if you're new to digital photography, this free little program might be all you need for quite some time.

You can download IrfanView from the PCWorld.com Downloads section.