Hi, there is a bit on removing the black bars in XNView here:
http://hkmdb.com/phpbb/viewtopic.php?t=44083
"A good start, but we can do more... like remove those pesky black bars, for instance. We can add multiple transforms to the list, and Auto Crop with a tolerance of 32 usually does the trick for black bar removal: "
I will try to write some more this weekend on cropping individual images (easy) and correcting colour/brightness/contrast in XNview (sometimes easy, sometimes not).