In article , Mayayana
wrote:

| I find it does virtually all I need to do. I'd need a very good reason
| to invest (and sorry to sound like "Arlen Holder" here, but "invest"
| includes learning time) in anything else.

No argument here. Graphic editors are tremendously
complex and take a long time to get the hang of.

the better ones are very easy to use.

| George P has presented a good example of what
| IV is good for: He has 50 screenshots. He doesn't
| care what format they are. JPG? Then he's going to
| damage them, at least slightly, in the cropping and
| resaving. He doesn't care. He apparently has no
|
| Not necessarily: "lossless JPEG crop" is possible. (Including in
| IrfanView; I don't know if just the basic IV or with the plugins, since
| I always install both anyway.) It is slightly restricted in that it
| limits the crop sizes (to a multiple of 16 pixels I think).

Yes. If you want to split hairs. But in general
a JPG is lossy. It's already damaged in being a JPG.
So there won't be many cases where a lossless JPG
crop is relevant.

false.

It might look fine, but a lot of data has already
been dumped out, even at top quality. (0 or 100
quality number, depending on which tool you use.)
That's important when you're trying to do operations
like saturation or brightness. Even in the best JPGs
you'll see little rectangles (blended pixels) when
you zoom in.

false.

subtract the highest quality jpeg from the original and you'll see
there is *very* little difference.

| IV has a batch processing ability, which can do some of those things
| (not sure which; I think I've only ever used it to rename). Obviously if
| he wanted to do _different_ things to each image it'd be no use, the
| same applying to any batch processing anything else can offer too.

Yes. Anything he's doing in batch mode is
general, with no concern for quality. That's
fine. There's a place for that. Like I said,
that's what IV is great for.

also false. batch mode does not affect quality. it just automates what
would otherwise have been done one by one.


Big changes happened as PCs matured. More good
and free software destroyed the shareware market.
It's not a matter of philosophy. It's just a matter of
changes in the landscape. I was also affected by
that change. Shareware doesn't sell anymore. People
don't need to pay for the software they use.

they do if they want quality. although there are exceptions, most free
software is not particularly good.

maybe that's why you are having difficulties figuring out how to use
your graphic editor.


There's very little software I've paid for. BootIt.
Paint Shop Pro. Visual Studio 6. But even some
versions of VS can be had for free these days in
the form of "express" versions. Free and OSS
products provide most of what most people need.

the many billions of dollars spent for software say otherwise.

(Thus, the cloud. If companies could keep selling
new updates for the high prices they used to get
then there would be no cloud. Cloud is just a land
grab being marketed as futuristic technology.)

false.


Yes, indeed. If you go to the store and pay 10
times the going rate for a light bulb in order to be
"licensed" to use it in a lamp at work, that's no skin
off my back. And if you buy carrots at $10 or 5
pounds each for the company picnic.... that's your
choice.
But this licensing is a scam. I don't point it out
because I like to rant. I point it out so that poor
suckers like you or me don't end up being tricked
into paying $10 for a carrot, or $500 for an office
suite they don't need. Or $40 for an image viewer
they don't need.

too bad you don't understand what you claim to be pointing out. nobody
is paying 10 times the going rate for anything.