Faststone Image Viewer by Faststone Software

Faststone Image Viewer by Faststone Software

If you've visited the Stall Wall recently, you'll know that I've had reason to take a multitude of digital images with my daughter and granddaughter visiting. For some time now, I have checked out a number of freeware programs that offer you exceptional options when it comes to working with images however, I found that Faststone Image Viewer has some very handy tools which made my photo work a breeze. If your interested, read on to see exactly what caught my eye:

Platform......
All windows platforms! 64 megs memory minimum.

Web Site.........
The link included above goes to their main page which contains this program as well as a few other freeware goodies (including a nice version of Pacman!). Once in the Image Viewer page (click the 'read more' link), you'll get a brief description of the program along with a screenshots, features list, history and three links for downloading. Very easy to read on a basic white background.  The first download connection is to Download.com, the other two are direct downloads.
Downloading........
As stated, one of the three links will get you the file. I prefer the last two for direct downloading rather than going through download.com. I've found all three were fast connections when I attempted each one. 

Size Downloaded: 2.5 meg for the self install
Size Installed: approx. 7 megs

Installation........
Faststone Image Viewer uses the standard installation engine giving you the usual choices of the EULA agreement, where to put it, and so forth. Again, it's quick and easy.

Help Files........
The help files with Faststone Image Viewer are nothing to brag about. In fact, they're almost down right non-existent! You get a one windowed document when clicking 'help' giving you tips as well as the listing of the keyboard shortcuts. Clicking on the 'Documentation' menu item really doesn't give you that much more.  I always tend to like programs that have good sized help files for individuals who are not too familiar with how certain programs work. 

Interface & Features......

The interface of FastStone Image Viewer was the first aspect of this program that I was attracted to! Fashioned similar to windows explorer, the whole design is skinned and can be changed by adding one of the nine choices that are available from the 'skins' menu at the top of the program.  Here's a pic of my opening screen and how I have my windows optimized for myself:

(garden photos scaled from full screen)

This setting for the zoom box gives a nice controlled area that has been magnified according to it's setting, which can vary from 1.0 to 3.0. Notice how the center of the flower stands out! Unfortunately, no bee.

Next to the zoom adjustments are two radio buttons for selecting one of two modes, Normal and Select. These basically govern how the mouse works when you click and drag while holding down the 'Ctrl' key. 'Normal' allows you to draw a box and zoom into it, while the Select Mode deals with actually working with the file such as print, crop, cut, copy, paste etc.
Sitting beside those zoom adjusters is the 'Resize/Resample' settings area where you can make specific size changes to the selected photo. This is the window which is presented:

The 'crop' tool brings up a crop board which allows you to square off a specific portion of your picture and place it in the clipboard or save it to a separate file (automatically suggesting the original file name and adding a '_cr' to it!). The crop board also gives you areas to make automatic size adjustments. Here's a pic:

The next two icons on the toolbar adjust the photo either ninety degrees to the left or right. Pretty simple really. Going to the next icon, we find a tool that allows you to compare up to 4 images at once. Each image can be adjusted simutaniously or separately using your mouse and keyboard. Here's where it would be easy to compare apples with oranges. Here's a pic of this feature with each photo adjusted differently:

The next icon brings up the slideshow feature which takes your selected photos and presents them to you with one of 156 transitional effects along with your choice of tunes if you prefer. There are numerous ways to set this feature including looping, stretching, smooth image rendering, showing the full file info etc. Here's a pic of the slideshow window along with the window for setting the transition for the slideshow itself which gives you an actual sample of exactly what the effect does:

With the next tool, sending images with your default e-mail client is as easy as clicking the icon, selecting the photos to send, changing the size and file names attributes if necessary (nice feature!), make a few more adjustments, and click away. Here's a pic of the window for selecting e-mail images:

Of course, working within the original multiple windowed display is one thing however, much work is performed in the full screen mode. With Image Viewer, there are tons of ways just to get to the full screen. Double click on any picture, click on the far right icon on the toolbar,  clicking on the sample image, up at the menu bar, right click on an image, well like I said, there's no shortage of ways! Once there, Image Viewer gives you full access to all tools and adjustments via placing the mouse to the four edges of the screen. Each edge of the full screen view gives you a different menu to everything that you can access from the windowed display.  The left edge gives you all of your tools in a menu driven window with titles. The right edge of the screen gives you all of the details of the file itself including the EXIF information and a place where you can put your own comments into the photo itself. Here's two pics of the edge windows to give you a good idea. Remember, these are from FULL SCREEN mode:

          

Going to the upper and lower edges bring up more goodies. If you go north, you'll bring up a window with your current full screened pic to the far right along with the previous few pics and a horizontal scroll bar that lets you glide through your pics to change to a different full screened pic. The lower edge gives you the exact toolbar that you get in the windowed view that we started with. Here's a pic of the full screen view with the upper scroll windows showing:

Though Faststone Image Viewer has these great features, especially from full screen, there's more to it than that! You can also perform batch conversions of your photo files. Faststone supports .jpg, .gif, .tiff, .bmp and more. Here's a pic of the conversion window:

Faststone Image Viewer also includes red eye reduction, sharpen/blur, RGB adjustments, Brightness/Contrast/Gamma adjustments,  edge detection, grayscale, negative adjustments as well as slides for controlling Hue/Saturation/Lightness. Here's a pic of the control window for one of these features:

Does It Work.....
  Faststone Image Viewer works very well for me. I especially like the work that can be performed from the full screen mode with all of the tools and info just an edge away. I can use it for both my picture collections as well as working with individual files such as the pics for this review.