Photo sketch tutorial and swapping colors using IrfanView

Posted on July 29, 2008 at 5:35 am

IrfanView is a freeware that is known for viewing images. Remember those pre-thumbnail days when you can’t see a picture until you open it using a picture viewer? PC users during the Windows ME and 98 eras are sure to be familiar with IrfanView.

IrfanView from www.irfanview.com/ is free for non-commercial use. The good thing about IrfanView is that it lets you do common image editing tasks like resizing, color enhancements, creating panoramas, red eye reduction and others. All of the image correction and editing features are neatly lined up in the Image menu:

Using a combination of effects pre built-in on IrfanView we can make an image that looks like it was hand sketched:

To achieve this effect, open the image that you want to convert using IrfanView. I strongly advice the novice users to create a backup copy of the original picture files before you edit them to be safe.

Click file open then choose the file that you want to edit. When you see the picture come out, click Image > Effects > Edge Detection:

The output will be an almost black and white outlined drawing of the picture:

The Edge Detection algorithm creates an outline image of the original picture. This is a very handy way to make a sketch of a picture for artistic purposes like t-shirt prints or posters.

If you want to invert the colors to make the outline dark and the background light, click Image > Negative:

The effect is an inverted color version of the picture:

Not bad for a free software huh?

Here is another cool IrfanView tip: Color Swapping.

See example below:

Original Picture:

After Color Swapping:

Color Swapping lets you rearrange the primary RGB (Red, Green and Blue) colors of a picture into a different combination. For example, like on the image above, I swapped the red color for a green color.

Let’s start with the original picture of a red drum kit:

To use this effect, click Image > Swap colors > RGB – GRB:

“RGB -> GRB” means that I am changing or swapping the Red to Green, Green to Red, and Blue to Blue. The output looks like below:

A Red to Blue swap on the other hand will yield the blue version of the kit:

IrfanView is an oldie but goodie program. It packs a punch of many enhancements since it first appeared. Its support for plug-ins and many useful photo editing functionalities make it worth a look among other photo editing software. It is quick and doesn’t hog much computer resources. All operations on pictures are done instantly. If you need a quick, effective and free way to edit your pictures, this definitely should be in your computer.

Ben Carigtan writes about technology, web sites, software and other trendy tech topics.

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Comments

2 Responses to “Photo sketch tutorial and swapping colors using IrfanView”

K-IntheHouse said on : July 30th, 2008 at 1:11 pm

I love IrfanView too and thanks for showing this cool tip. I have been wanting to create a sketcup of my picture for Twitter and I am going to try it with this! Stumbled!

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