Tag: irfanview

What is your favourite image editing program?

Luke Johnson

Some of you may be surprised to know that Windows Photo Viewer and Office Picture Manager are not the only ways to view and edit image files 🙂  Here are three of my favourites:

1)  Irfanview has been updated to version 4.35.  You can download from CNET here.  This is a superfast image viewing and editing program.  I love it for its highly adjustable batch image processing ability.

You can download all the current plugins from here.  This includes a new plugin that will allow Irfanview to open DXF files, as per this list.  The DXF plugin is provided by BabaCAD – they also provide free CAD software for download at http://www.babacad.com/index.html

2)  Paint.NET – quick and easy

3)  Photoshop – awesome filters and effects, and great at enhancing still photos of your buildings

4) GIMP – Andy Milburn reminded me about this in the comments.  I haven’t used it for a long while, but it is essentially a free replacement for Photoshop.

5) pixlr – another great tip from the comments.  RicardoCC referred me to this online image editor that was actually purchased by Autodesk.  Have you tried it yet?

Compressing PDF using free tools

Luke Johnson

Do you have some large format black and white PDF drawings that are taking up excessive space?  Perhaps they contain multi-layered vector information that is clogging them up.  You can easily make them smaller by recompressing into TIFF format with G4 compression.

Option 1 – PDF Tools and Irfanview

  1. Convert PDF to multipage TIFF using PDFill PDF Editor with FREE PDF Writer and FREE PDF Tools
  2. Open TIFF and save as TIF with G4 compression in Irfanview (suggested dpi setting 200 dpi)

Option 2 – PDF-Xchange Viewer

  1. Open PDF in PDF-Xchange Viewer
  2. File – Export – Export to Image
  3. Page Range – All
  4. Use TIFF format, Options – Compression – CCITT Group 4 fax
  5. DPI settings at 300 all round (for other settings also see image below)
  6. Click Export…

If you want to make a TIFF into a PDF again, just open in Irfanview and Print to PDF file using CutePDF or similar.  The resulting PDF will generally be way smaller than the original PDF.