Many thanks to Tammy Rodgers for preparing this guide to using the graphics viewing program IrfanViewer for the online tatting class. Many of the tatters in class are scanning lace pieces and posting to the web. I, of course, use dozens of scans to help illustrate the online tatting class lessons and the patterns and homework that is shared. As a newbie with graphics I had a complete lack of understanding of the nuances of "size" when it came to manipulating the graphics. Many of you will remember early lessons which had huge photos on the screen and took forever to load and to print. And even when the scan looked just perfect on my screen some of you were seeing an entirely different view depending on the parameters of your browser.

Several helpful tatters experienced with such matters tried to guide me in making "smaller" scans to post, but I really didn't understood "what" exactly needed to be done. Then Tammy came knocking on my email door and began to "talk" to me about the scans. I sent her the huge scans, she made them workable. This was a great help but the biggest help of all came when she had me download this program and guided me through using it.

So, please, take a few minutes and downloard this program. It is free. Tammy has prepared a guide for us to follow complete with photos that will look just like the screens you will see. This is one of those times when you don't need to truly understand what is happening (just as it is not neccessary to truly understand the mechanics of the internal combustion engine as long as you can turn the key and the car starts, right?). Just do it! It will be an enormous help.

The Basics: Starting up and resizing includes diagrams A, B and C
The Basics: Saving and adding text includes diagrams D, E and F
The Basics: Cropping, cutting and pasting includes diagrams G, H and I
IrfanViewer Doily Photo and Diagram for Practicing the new techniques