IrfanPaint Support Thread

[matera]

A lot of people don't look at the Status Bar on any program, and on mine the font size that I need for other things makes most of the information there unreadable or at least not very informative. Also, some who are new to working with images outside of the user-controlling environment of a photo organizer need to get used to the fact that there are different coor depths! Thank Irfan (and Matteo) for good things

[Bhikkhu Pesala]

Updated my IrfanPaint Help Page for Beta 66, adding the measure tool. As always, comments welcome and feel free to use any of this on the official IrfanPaint site.

I think the rotate icon could do with being clearer. Maybe someone could create a 16x16 pixel icon to suit.

[MItaly]

Great work, as usual; just a little correction:

Click and drag the tool along a straight line or between two points that you want to be on a horizontal line after rotation.

it works also for lines that you want to be vertical.
For the rotate icon, I'm sorry but I'm really not very good in drawing, if someone can create a better 16x16 icon I'll be glad to replace the existing one.

[matera]

There isn't much one can do with 16 pixels

I am in a new spasm of enthusiasm after using the Color Replacer on a scanned map that I downloaded. It's like wiping old dirt off the surface to make the lines clear again. Much faster for spot-cleaning than using something with an over-zealous "fuzzy" selection tool that grabs too large a selection and ties up my poor plodding computer for ten minutes.

[Bhikkhu Pesala]

There isn't much one can do with 16 pixels.

True enough, but with 256 pixels and 16.7 million colours one could do quite a lot — if one can draw, that is.

[MItaly]

There isn't much one can do with 16 pixels

I know; see also the Wikipedia, that says that "The creation of a good function icon can be considered an art form in itself, comparable to that practiced in the past in the domain of miniature painting by old masters such as Joseph Severn and Charles-Francois Daubigny.".

[matera]

And of course IrfanView and a certain plugin make it much easier make and/or touch up small masterpieces. Any time I need a single custom icon...

The current icon is "readable", even with my delapidated eyes. It is hard to come up with something that has more impact in the same space.

The big problem with small images is design. I think the trend toward huge eye-cons is turning the art into plastic garbage. Too many of the wonderful new whooptie-do Vista style ones are fuzzy and meaningless to me. End of micro-rant.

[Bhikkhu Pesala]

The current icon is "readable", even with my delapidated eyes. It is hard to come up with something that has more impact in the same space.

The current icon is hard to distinguish from the Brush settings icon to my dilapidated eyes. It is easy to come up with something that is clearly identifiable — but much harder to come up with something that actually looks good too.

[Frank]

another symbol for the straighten/rotate tool

Why not?!
I also think, another symbol would be better to see and understand!
(And to see the differences ...)
I suggest something like the GIMP's rotate tool icon:

[Sam_Zen]

I agree about the specific art of miniature painting requested by a 16x16 icon.
And I agree about the enthusiasm of matera concerning denoising background with the Color Replacer.
Before replacing things, I wanted to have a look at the existing icon, to check for any improvement.
It appears to be nr 1013, I extracted that one and fiddled around a bit with some pixels, with IrfanPaint itself,
using the Color Picker and the Color Replacer.

(I don't understand by the way the auto-jump of focus to the replacer tool after one use of the color picker.
Maybe I just want to set foreground and background color to use later for something else.)

[matera]

After a few more hours of killing time and pixels with my favorite toy, I have a suggestion that in my opinion leaves icons in the dust. Cursors! Alas, we poor artists can hardly see our brush at all sometimes, only the trail of paint it leaves. The line tool is particularly bad. It completely disappears when I use it on a neutral gray. A few days ago, I was trying to "dam" some color gaps in order to use the bucket fill to make a contrasting background around an embossed symbol, and I hardly knew where the line was going to end up. I don't know off hand what the fix would be. Inverting pixels on gray are like chameleons on plaid, I suppose, going crazy trying to please everyone. But maybe a black-and-white component somewhere would help.

[Bhikkhu Pesala]

I extracted that one and fiddled around a bit with some pixels, with IrfanPaint itself, using the Color Picker and the Color Replacer.

This looks clearer on a white background, the problem for me is the red arrows. On the green toolbar background they disappear because of red/green colour-blindness, which is one of the most common types.

On this test chart, I can only see the numbers 25 and 56. I can just about make out the 29 if I cheat and look at the table below, so that I know what I am looking for. I can tell that there may be a number where the 6 should be, but it could be almost anything, though I can see it clearly if I zoom out to 50% using Opera's zoom feature. The other numbers and the 29 do not become clear whatever the zoom level is.

The Gimp's icon is much better, but it is also bigger.

(I don't understand by the way the auto-jump of focus to the replacer tool after one use of the color picker.
Maybe I just want to set foreground and background color to use later for something else.)

Turn on the extended tooltip help to learn how to use the tools. Hold down shift while clicking on the colour-picker to prevent the automatic reversion to the previously selected tool.

[Sam_Zen]

This looks clearer on a white background, the problem for me is the red arrows.

Yep, I had my doubts too about the red arrows, even without color blindness (nice test chart by the way).
So I tried purple, but I've no idea if it helps. And I made another icon as well.

[matera]

I like the tilty-thing, it is very clear and sensible.

Any tool-icon with a transparent background is always going to get into trouble somewhere. I have played with the Windwoes interface and have seen how much misery certain colors can cause. I tried a few very dark color schemes, with light-colored fonts, only to find that while most buttons and such were readable, some program dialogs had hard-coded font or background colors that mocked my futile window-dressing. It's like web design -- however nice it is from one view, somebody else is going to see poo.

[Frank]

feature requests: "free hand cutting tool"

Is it possible to add a "free hand cutting tool" in the toolbar of IrfanPaint?
That meant: free hand mode, adjustable from a smooth cut up to a rough cut and some other options!


PS:
And what does the author and the users of the IrfanPaint plugin say to the new beta V0.2.0 of RIOT?
Any problems, ideas or feedback?!
See the last messages in the thread: "RIOT plugin for Irfan View"