You can do very nice things with Irfanview (from now on called I.V.).
We will start with the basic guidelines. Make a chat photo and then save it. For example you want to make a photograph at chatboxx, chatpoint, 121chat or where ever you like, from yourself or together with friends. To make this photograph, press the 'Print Scrn' button at your keyboard (normally at the right of the 'F12' key). Start the program I.V. and click at 'edit/paste'. Select the area of the photograph you want to have for your image. Drag a square with the mouse around that area while keeping the left mouse button pressed down. After releasing the mouse button and clicking at 'edit/crop', you will see that the unnecessary area disappeared. Only the selected area will be there. You can now save the image as JPG or GIF image. Before you save, you can add some effects to the image...
For example the 3d button. A funny looking border around the image like this:
How to make that border? Follow the instructions: Open the image with I.V. Select from the menu: Image/effect... Here you can chouse a lot of effects. The one we used for the border is called '3d button'. When you think the border is to wide or small, you can change that at Image/effects/setup. You now have the possibility to change the values for the border width. More pixels is wider, less pixels is smaller.
Above effect is called 'emboss'
'pixelize'.. the strength of the pixels are change at above image. Choose Image/effects/setup.
'fine rotation' is used to rotate the image and choose Image/effects/setup to do that.
and to finish a funny one: 'explosion'. With this effect you can make in combination with Movie Gear a very nice animation of an exploding image. Use the pixelize effect and open the image with MovieGear. Use again the pixelize effect in I.V. and add this picture to MovieGear too. Repeat this a couple of times until the image is completely unrecognizable. When you see the animation at MovieGear, it seems that you image is exploded.
Isn't that fun? For guidelines about MovieGear,
CLICK HERE