Personalization is the password of modern computer science. The users, the expert ones and the less well-versed, among the things they never give up that can be done with the computer, is to personalize it and make the desktop something less cold and more beautiful to look at.
On the backgrounds we have written a large article with the recommendation of the best sites in which to find and download high quality wallpapers, hd and of all types.
Since, however, most likely, people like to use them as wallpapers for the desktop, their own photographs, perhaps those of the holidays, or to use motivational or funny images, it could be useful to know how to set the images as wallpapers in an optimal and simple way .
Duty premise: this guide is very simple, without tricks or special effects and suitable only for those who are less experienced with the computer, for others, those who know how to play with images and with the Windows desktop settings probably there will be nothing new .
Creating personalized desktop wallpapers for the computer is clearly child's play but, without taking anything for granted, you can draw up some tips to guide anyone to create a beautiful background from their own photograph, suitable for your monitor, without weighing down the computer and without having distorted images.
1) First it is important to choose the resolution of the photo so that it is adapted to the screen of your monitor .
The size of the images must match the size of the desktop so that the image does not stretch or repeat or be smaller leaving an unwanted frame.
To know the screen resolution just click with the right mouse button on any empty point of the desktop and click on "Properties".
From the Display Settings, squeeze again on the Properties and note the screen size in Pixel.
2) For the choice of the background, a great photograph is the one that fully expresses the feeling, in the deepest sense, of what is photographed but, I add, always being careful to match its dimensions to the resolution of the monitor.
If you have several photos in a folder, perhaps related to a trip or a vacation, there is no limitation to consider being able to make a collage or a poster-like composition with multiple photos together.
In other articles we have seen several programs to create collages or personalized photo albums.
Another thing to pay attention to is the coloring of the image which should have more or less uniform spaces so that you can then position the icons that would otherwise be difficult to see and read.
3) Going back to the size of the image, if the photo to be used was taken with a modern and high resolution digital camera, it must be remembered that a 1280x1024 screen has 3.5 Megapixel resolution so it is useless to put a 7 Megapixel photo as background which is huge and heavy.
To resize an image and make it smaller, the programs that can be used and the commands to be activated are:
IrfanView, my favorite: Image -> Resize / resample -> resize to numbers keeping the flag on "Preserve Aspect Ratio" which keeps intact the proportions rta height and width.
In Photoshop: Image -> Image Size
In GIMP, the open source photoshop is free: Image –-> Scale Image (use the chain icon).
The most important thing for any image editor used is however the maintenance of the proportions which is generally indicated in English with the terms " Constrain Proportions " or " Preserve Aspect Ratio ".
Not using this setting results in a distorted image with the proportions worse than those of a 16/9 film seen on a 4/3 TV.
This constraint of the proportions will probably not allow you to adapt any photograph to the desktop resolution however you can be satisfied with a difference between 10-20 pixels which will then be corrected in the next step.
If the image is very far from the dimensions indicated then it will probably be better to cut it and, to do this, using Irfanview again, you can select an area and choose " Crop Selection " in order to eliminate everything that is outside.
4) At the end of the adaptation, you can save the image file which, for a 1024 × 768 background, is about 100 or 150KB in terms of file size.
The images with rich and vivid colors will probably be larger but the thing that I want to emphasize is that a 7 Megapixel photo is also 1 MB large and putting it as a background will consume an entire Megabyte of Ram on the computer.
When saving, always taking the IrfanView program, you can choose the file format and quality.
The advice is to use JPEG files that are the most compressed and to set 80% quality than the original.
5) Finally, everyone knows this, I think, to set the desktop background, press the right mouse button on the empty screen, go to the desktop properties, choose the image from the computer and put the "extended" position that corrects any differences between resolutions.
Finally, I would like to point out other customization options:
- You can set a video as a background (but it should only be used as a game and not as a fixed configuration because it weighs on memory)
- You can manage the desktop with a program that animates it and enriches it with special effects and automatic collages.
- You can periodically rotate and change the photo used as a background
- You can customize and create a new screensaver with your photos.
