Fix those photos

I see too many machines through my workshop with desktop wallpapers that don't fit, the images stretched or squeezed so they look like reflections in bendy mirrors at the fair.

While Windows gives us basic options when placing a desktop picture, (centred, tiled or stretched), the OS is short on functionality required to edit our images to better suit the purpose.

There is MS Paint, but this is the virtual equivalent of a crayon set. That said, a real artist can work wonders with crayons, as evidenced by some of the stunning imagery created solely with MS Paint; (Google for examples).

For those of us who are artistically challenged, however, Paint just doesn't blow our hair back.

But what else is there, aside from a virused-up copy of Photoshop downloaded from some warez site? There are several programs that will do what we want without resorting to the peer-to-peer virus propagation networks.

You have to make a choice; do you want a dedicated photo-editing program, or image-viewing software with editing capability? This all depends on whether you will be doing more photo/image editing than desktop picture resizing or preparing snaps of the baby to email to the grandparents.

While many scanners and cameras come with editing software, most of it is cheapware (they are giving it away) that hijacks file associations and installs start-up rubbish. In most cases you need only the device drivers, not the fluff, so I always use the Custom Install option and select only the drivers to install and use my usual graphics editor instead.

Unfortunately for freeware seekers, most decent, dedicated photo-editing software is shareware, (Ulead/Corel PhotoImpact is my choice), but there is some good freeware, like Twisted Brush, PhotoPlus and Picassa from Google, as well as general graphics software such as The Gimp and Paint.Net that can do photo work.

There are also online editing sites, where you upload your image, tweak it and download it when done, though I prefer to install programs on my machine.

As for image-viewing software, most are freeware. My choice is Xnview; it is very fast, has a folder/ thumbnail browser and a reasonable set of basic editing tools.

FastStone is another good one (they also do several other neat, graphics-related applications) but is a bit heavier on resources.

IrfanView is an old favourite and, if you can still find them to download, old versions of ACDSee and SlowView were two of the best.

Whatever you use, you have to get your head around resizing; you can have a huge file (measured in megabytes) but a small image (measured in pixels or centimetres) on your screen or printer. A postage stamp scanned at 1200 dots-per-inch (DPI) can take up gigabytes of disk space, yet is still stamp-sized.

Generally, physically resizing an image will reduce file size, but not always. You can also make images smaller by saving in a compressed format, like jpg (or jpeg) format; this reduces file size while retaining most visual quality, the image version of an audio MP3.

To fit images on your desktop properly, you need to find your screen resolution; (Display Properties in the Control Panel). Mine is 1920 x 1080, so any image I want to look right has to be either that size or in the same proportion to avoid distortion. An image 960 x 540 pixels will fit nicely.

The final option is tiled, where the image is replicated across the desktop. This can look terrible if the image is not suited for tiling.

Happy editing.