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PIXresizer.
Pixresizer allows you to quickly resize, or convert .bmp,
.gif, .jpg, .png, and .tiff images, for sending by email,
posting on the internet, or simply to save space on your
hard drive.
You can resize, or convert a single image, or a whole
folder of images and processed images are saved in a
different folder to the original.
Pixresizer is very quick and easy to use, with a
comprehensive help file. Your chosen image is shown to
the right and a selection of useful resize options is
shown on the left, you also use a custom size.
You can alter the quality settings for .jpg images, but
sadly, there are no quality, compression, or colour
settings for any of the other formats.
This lack of settings limits the programs use to email
images, or quick web postings, for other purposes a more
advanced image editor would give better results. But as
quick and simple image resizer, Pixresizer could prove
useful.
Freeware -- Download size 2.9Mb -- Win 98,ME,NT4,2000,2003,XP,Vista
http://bluefive.pair.com/pixresizer.htm
Gif
optimizer.
An excellent
utility for decreasing the file size of gifs, sometimes
by as much as 70%.
The basic controls are quite simple, you can convert a
folder full of gifs or a single gif file, it will show
how much it can improve them by when you open the file,
pressing optimize, optimizes the files.
Note: it does not save the original
file, so I would only use it on a copy of your original.
Check your gif is not "read only" if it refuses
to optimize it, animated gifs sometimes do not come out
right, so keep a backup.
Freeware -- Download size 257k -- Win 98, XP
Gif Optimizer
DCE
enhance.
If like me you
have a digital camera, you probably find that the
pictures you take tend to come out a little wishy washy
and in need of improvement. Thats where DCE Enhance comes
in, you just load the picture in and then it does its
stuff and hey presto your pictures are much improved.
It does have some user controls, but I usually only alter
the buttons for landscape, mid details or close ups, and
if I'm printing the result, I will lighten the picture
slightly with the midtones slider, most of the time this
little utility does a far better job of improving the
photo's on its own, than I could ever do.
Freeware -- Download size 524K -- Win 98/XP
http://www.mediachance.com/digicam/enhancer.htm
UnFREEz.
Creating your own
animated gifs can be tricky, unFREEz makes it a little easier by allowing you to
set the speed and repeating of your gif. You need to
first create your gif images, you can do this in MS Paint,
you then drag and drop them into unFREEz, set your
options and hey presto! an animated gif.
Freeware -- Download size 20k -- Win 98/XP
The unFREEz web site is at http://www.whitsoftdev.com/unfreez/ and you should save the web page,
as the instructions are on it (none come with the
download).
GiFFY
v2.3
GiFFY is a free
utility that can convert .bmp files to .gif format and
vice-versa.
With just a few clicks, GiFFY can create transparent, non-transparent,
interlaced, and non-interlaced GIFs.
One reason you'd use GiFFY is that it can fix .gif files
which some Internet browsers (particularly some versions
of Netscape) can't read in Java applets.
I have found GiFFY to be very good at converting .bmp
files to .gif's and its far easier and quicker than
starting up your main graphics editor.
Freeware -- Download size 250k -- Win 95/98/NT/2K/ME/XP
Download Giffy. 250k.
Resizer
by Peter Bone.
One of the main
problems when you have a web site, is keeping any
pictures files you use to a reasonable size, in order to
keep the download time to a minimum. One of the best ways
to keep the file size down is to reduce the pictures
actual size, but this presents its own problems, often
the converted picture comes out very poor and blurred
looking and not really usable.
Resize does its image altering, bigger or smaller, by
using a system called pixel averaging, which gives better
results than the more commonly used sub-sampling.
While I freely admit that I have no idea what either of
those two terms mean, in practice it does seem to work,
giving noticeably better results, as they say in the
washing powder adverts.
Resize works with .bmp and .jpg files and can be used as
a simple convertor if the size settings are left at 100%,
I usually do the resizing using .bmp files and then save
them as .jpg's, or save them as .bmp's and convert them
to .gifs using the excellent Giffy, which can be found on
this page.
Resize is excellent for size altering, it wont give pin
sharp alterations to pictures containing text, but it
does a better job than most graphics programs.
Freeware -- Download size 340k -- Win 98/XP
http://www.geocities.com/peter_bone_uk/
Colour
editor v2.2 by Peter Bone.
A straightforward
screenshot is usually too large for a web site.
The normal solution for this problem is to resize the
image, unfortunately the results of resizing vary
enormously in quality, particularly if the image contains
any text.
You can enhance the image and sharpen it, but this doesn't
work very well and can add enormously to the file size.
This is where Colour Editor comes in, what it does is
quite simple but very clever, you select a colour in your
chosen image ( The image can be a jpg or bmp, but its
always best to work in bmp and convert to jpg or gif
later.) and then choose a colour you would like to change
it to and press change.
The clever bit is the slider in the center of the
interface, this controls the colour tolerance, this
allows you to set, for example a range of blues, all to
one colour, this allows you to correct to a degree the
dither introduced by resizing.
By widening the colour tolerance of the text, resized
text that has gone fuzzy looking can be substantially
improved.
The Colour Editor works best on images such as interfaces
and logos, its not really suitable for images with a lot
of shades, like in a photograph, but used sparingly it
can improve your image quality while decreasing the file
size.
As I mentioned earlier its best to work in bmp format and
then convert to jpg for complex images, or gif for images
with a lot of flat colours.
Note: A bulk Colour Editor is now also
included in the download, this allows you to alter
colours in more than one image at the same time, perhaps
useful for swapping colours in a lot of similar images.
Freeware -- Download size 560k -- Win 98/XP
http://www.geocities.com/peter_bone_uk/
Rob Goldfish Web Site
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