Learning Irfanview - painlessly

[eager]

Hi there,

I have no training or experience in Irfanview or any graphics program.

I don't generally learn well or quickly from a book.

I was wondering if there was anything akin to ....Here's the top 20 tasks Irfanview is most commonly used for and how to do them.

Ex. Removing red eye from photos, etc.

Is there a YouTube video, Web site, DVD tutorial which might get me up to speed quickly (and painlessly!) on common tasks?

I'm not looking to become an Irfanview expert - just semi-functional in Irfanview.

Thank you so much for your thoughts, suggestions, help and understanding.

[Bhikkhu Pesala]

My help site may be enough to get you started.

[Mij]

Hi eager
If you want videos just go to Youtube, type Irfanview into the Search box and you will see lots of videos. Some are good, some are terrible but browse around and you will find something useful there. For very simple step-by-step instruction try Ehow and search there for Irfanview.
Remember that much of what you find this way will have been prepared by amateurs many of them having only a very limited knowledge of Irfanview, so some of the information may be incorrect or refer to earlier versions of the program.
The tutorials by Bhikkhu Pesala that you can link to at the bottom of his post above are more reliable and accurate and will help you if things do not work quite as they are shown in the videos. Remember to use the built in help from the Help menu in your copy of Irfanview also. Once you have learned what things are called from the sources above you should be able to follow the up-to-date instructions there.

[eager]

Learning Irfanview - painlessly

My help site may be enough to get you started.

Hi Bhikkhu,

Can you please post the url to your help site?

Thank you.

[Bhikkhu Pesala]

I already did — its in my forum signature.

[eager]

Hi Bhikkhu,

Right now I'm trying to figure out how to get the red out of the eyes in digital photos I've taken. I thought IRFANVIEW might be useful for that but I have no idea how to go about that.

Maybe learning Word or Excel is not a good analogy (and I only use them because I have to and resort to Open Office when I can).

But, before I started teaching myself Word I looked at a User Pre-Assessment checklist which asked a new user to Word the various tasks and if the user knew how to do them.

That was very helpful to me because then I learned that I should know how to change Styles, create macros, do a mail merge, etc. I still, at that point, had no idea what any of those nouns meant but then I could visit Wiki to discover what those tasks were and what they did for you.

Once I had my list of tasks I should learn and why how can help then I could search for ways to learn those functions as easily as possible.

I was hoping there might be something like that for IRFANVIEW.

But, that's basically what I'm trying to put together for myself. A kind of list of graphic goals and how they are accomplished with IRFANVIEW.

That way I could at least start to acquire the vocabulary of what tasks are done in Photo Shop and then how these tasks are accomplished in IRFANVIEW.

I'm not even sure when you would use GIMP -vs- when to use IRFANVIEW.

Thank you for all your insight, help and most of all patience.

[Mij]

Right now I'm trying to figure out how to get the red out of the eyes in digital photos I've taken. I thought IRFANVIEW might be useful for that but I have no idea how to go about that.

You could try using one of the methods I suggested.
At the very least look at the Help menu to see what information is there. In Contents all the Menu items are listed and you would quite easily have found "Red Eye reduction" on the Image menu. In Index you could have just typed "Red Eye.." and selected the item you want to Display.
If you could not find what you want in the Help file, then search in Google (or a similar search engine) for "Irfanview red eye" and select one of the videos, guides or tutorials that it finds for you.