Tips on making my screenshots look better.

With Irfan View you can achieve a lot, over time I have gained better knowlege of this excellent program and it has helped me greatly with bringing you my images. However, I haven't had the time to apply the following touchups to the 100's of images that I have here at johnofe.com, they are all raw results of the video stills, so heres some tips to show you what I do when wanting to make one of my pics look better.

The following keyboard shortcuts can be used anytime while viewing an image in Irfan View.
Some of my images may be too dark, an undesirable effect caused by my computers video capture card, this can either be resolved by hitting Shift-U to apply the auto colour correction. If this does not achieve the desired result, undo (Ctrl Z) and hit Shift-G and manually adjusting Gamma and Contrast. Don't touch the brighness control, that will not help matters. Bumping the Gamma up a bit then adjusting the contrast until it doesn't look over brightned is exactly what the auto correction does. Tinker and after a while you'll know what to do.

Another artifact caused by video grabbing and jpg compression is the graininess in the image, this can be correctd by hitting Ctrl-E and selecting Median Filter and setting it at 3, this smoothes everything out. For better results download Topaz DeJPEG plugin and Run that. (Topaz home page)