How to Create a Great Wallpaper for Your Computer Using Irfanview

Digital cameras have become the norm and have given the average person the ability to have a darkroom on their computer, but if you are unfamiliar with how graphic images work the whole process can be a very confusing challenge. In this article I'm going to show you how to make a background for your computer desktop using a free program that I like to use called Irfanview. It is a great program and you can't beat the price, it's free.

Here is the link to the program www.irfanview.com, here you will find the download for the program and documentation. Download and install the program following the instructions that they provide.

Now lets turn that digital picture of your kids or that picture of flowers in your backyard into a perfect background for your windows based computer.

You first need to have a picture, almost any picture will do but if the picture is small it will not fill up most of the space on you background. A general rule of thumb is that a picture can be decreased in size without loosing the quality of the picture, but if you have to enlarge the picture you will loose quality and have a blocky image. Modern digital cameras are usually above 1 mega pixel so this should'nt be much of a problem.

I'm going to use a 7 mega pixel image for an example. You normally wouldn't want to use a 7 mega pixel picture as a background image, the file is huge and will hog up computer resources having it displayed in that size. In my example the file is 2,355 KB or 2.4 mega bytes in size. We want to drastically reduce the size of the file while still giving you a great background to use that won't drag your computer performance down.

Here are the steps:
Start Irfanview. Select "file" at the top left of the program screen then move you pointer down to "open", then click "open". Find the picture you want to set as a background and select it. Then click "open". The picture will appear but if the picture is big you will only see part of the picture on the screen. Then click "image" from the top menu and move your pointer to "resize/resample" and click. When the box appears it will give your image information on the left and options on the right. You can either choose "best fit to desktop" or the screen size that you have set for your computer screen. I'm going to select "1024 X 768" because it is the screen size that my monitor is set to. Then click "OK" You will see that the picture size has changed on your screen and should fit very well. Next save the image by clicking on "file" on the top left of the menu. Then click on "save as" Select the directory you would like to save the picture file in then change the name so you don't overwrite the original file. Make sure the "save as type" is either JPG or BMP. JPG will give you a smaller file. Then select "save". In my example the file has changed from 2,355 KB in size to 62KB in size. Next select "options" from the top menu and move the pointer down to "Set as Wallpaper" move the pointer to "centered" and click. Irfanview has copied the picture to the directory that other wallpapers are stored on your system and set it as your background. You're done.

This is just one of the many things you can do with Irfanview. You can also rotate, crop, enhance colors of your image and much more.