User Story       by R. Prasad, Ottawa, Canada

Step 2: Select the color mode

This is usually a fairly advanced feature that allows you to customize the way some file formats encode and display colors. For the purpose of the example, I will just leave it as is, and click "Next."

Step 3: Specify a scale

On this screen, the drop down menu offers you several choices on how to resize your photos. You can choose to specify a particular or maximum width, or height, scale to a percentage of the original, or just leave the image alone. If you set a width or height, MagicViewer will resize your image proportionally - that is, it will modify your image to the width or height you specify, then alter the other dimension to an appropriate length. All the measurements are in pixels. If you chose one of the max options, MagicViewer will resize any larger sized files to the width or height that you specify, and will proportionally resize the other dimension accordingly.
In my case, all I know is that my original picture is way too big to be posted on the web - I just looked at it and thought "I think a quarter of that size would be enough for my website." So I just chose the "Specify Scale %" option, and entered 25 as the value. This means that MagicViewer will take the original photo, no matter what the pixel dimensions are, and reduce it to 25% of the original size. It does this by reducing the linear dimensions to 25% of the original. Since my original photo was 1536 pixels wide by 1024 pixels high, a reduction to 25% means that my final photo (the one with the cable cars in it above) has final dimensions that are one fourth of the original dimensions, so it will be 384 pixels wide by 256 pixels high. If you wanted your images to be half the original size, you would enter 50 as the reduction value, and so on.

This screen also lets you adjust the rotation of the image - in case you have a collection of photos that were shot when the camera was sideways. MagicViewer allows you to rotate images in 90-degree increments - just click on the drop-down menu, and choose which particular rotation you want. In this case, I am just going to leave it alone, since my pictures were a mix of landscape and portrait images. I could always resize the photos in one batch script, then create another to rotate all the landscape (sideways) images that I highlight from the browse menu. (Hint: this is a great next step after this lesson is done...)

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