FastStone Image Viewer

Introduction
FastStone image viewer is a user-friendly, fast and accurate image browser, editor and converter. The list of features is really too large to discuss here but just to give you an idea, FastStone Image Viewer supports color adjustments, red-eye removal, high quality magnifier, shadow effects, scanner support, email support, histogram etc. With all that said, all that is left to do is to actually install FastStone Image Viewer and see for ourselves.

FastStone Image Viewer Installation:
You can get FastStone Image Viewer (for free, of course) from the official website: http://www.faststone.org/FSViewerDetail.htm .
Now let’s quickly go through the installation steps:

• Double click on the setup  and click “Next”
• Once again, click “Next”
• Choose the location where you want the application to be installed and click “Install”
• Yeap, that’s it! Click “Finish”; you’re done.

Couldn’t really be easier; could it?

How to use FastStone Image Viewer:

Without loosing any time, either open FastStone Image Viewer by double clicking the desktop icon or go to:

Click on: Start->Programs->FastStone Image Viewer-> FastStone Image Viewer

This is what you should be looking at:

• The area I have marked with number #1 is a typical Tree-View of your PC’s drives, folders and files. You can use this area to manually navigate through the contents of your PC.
• Now, if you look closely, you will notice that the area marked with number #2 is a thumbnail preview of the location that you are currently browsing in the Tree-View (Marked with number #1 in the image above).
• The third area (Marked with number #3 in the image above) is used for previewing the image that you have selected. In the screenshot above, no image was selected so that area remains grey.

Now use the navigation tree (Marked with number #1 in the image above) and go to a folder where you have a few images. When you are there, simply click on one image; this is what you should be looking at:

As you can see, the image that you have selected (by clicking once on it) is now displayed in the image preview area.

• If you double click on an image, you will see a full screen version of it; then, by clicking and dragging your mouse around, you will discover the very cool magnifying feature of FastStone Image viewer.
• Basically, for everything that you want to do, you need to first select an image and then select an operation.
• If you want to convert an image, all you have to do is to select it and go to File->Save As… There, you simply choose the new file type and you click “Save”. That simple.
• You can use features such as red-eye removal by selecting an image and then going to the appropriate menu choice. For the concrete example of red-eye removal, you need to click on the menu option Edit->Red Eye Removal.

Conclusion
As you can see, FastStone Image Viewer is a very easy-to-use, yet powerful utility. In fact, it features so many options that chances are you will never even need to use some of them!