NeDayGIG and Photography/Digital Imaging July 2010
By Ron Cummins
Colin Lampshire, as usual, welcomed members and launched the
meeting with a report on SOSOS which is S/W that gives you an analysis and
summary of the details of your computer (cf. Belarc). Its name is an acronym of
"Son of Snoop on Steroids". Until the tea break the meeting was given
over to the usual Q and A and general exchange of information. After the break
the floor was yielded to Peter Bellmont who then gave us a briefing on the newest
incarnation of Photoshop CS. He talked first about the Noise Reduction facility
which is used to remove noise that is inevitably introduced when any camera is
being used in low levels of lighting. The S/W has been much improved by a
complete rewrite of the algorithm used. It enables intervention using a slider
in Luminance, Detail, Contrast, Colour and Colour Detail. After any treatment
however the image cannot be saved in Raw. He then gave us a demonstration of
other improved facilities such as those for brightness and contrast for
exposing some detail in a white coolie hat against a white'sky. He then showed
us how to improve the eyes on a subject by using the lassoo tool again and
using "refine edge". He advised that when changing the contrast
between dark and light boundaries to improve sharpness it works better at low
threshold i.e. 0 or 1. The S/W even includes a 'lens correction' to adjust any
distortion introduced by the camera's lens. This correction is not an average
but is tailored for a extensive range of cameras and their lenses. Peter's
expertise with the program makes it look so easy to do, it is equally easy to
forget that this expert retouching is painstaking work.
bNeDayGIG and Photography/Digital Imaging February 2010
By Ron Cummins
Colin Lampshire welcomed a full house for the firstmeeting of the New Year and introduced George Skarbek, who needs nointroduction to most of us. Indeed George was to be the main peaker for the
meeting and he was an added bonus for the Q and A session. After this session
George introduced us to a program that he had written last year that provides
an index to the mammoth critical survey of free/shareware S/W programs covering
some 200 categories such a spyware, recording, antivirus that is at
www.techsupportalert.com. His program takes the user directly to the relevant
page in the pdf. document. George took
the floor after the break to give us a demonstration of geotagging one's photos
and hence relieving one of the chore of trying to remember where a particular
photo was taken. Ideal for enthusiastic shutter bugs. It is simply adding GPS
coordinates to the metadata already
stored by the camera. Some high-end cameras already have GPS built in but it is
some way from a standard feature. There are a number of dedicated GPS systems
(ca $150) that can be hand carried with the camera and some SLR have a hot shoe
connection. As it is many car units can download the log file and use S/W such
as GpicSync to do the addition to the metadata once the camera timestamp
facility is in the same time slot as the GPS. For instance adjustment must be
made that Eastern Australia is GMT+10 relative to GPS signals. He then gave us
a demonstration of the ease with which geotagging can be achieved by
synchronising photos that he had taken during his trip from Glen Waverley to
Ivanhoe with his car GPS log and showing us that the data had been added to the
metadata info. He also enlisted Google Earth to deliver a video of the track of
the journey with the photos shown at the correct locations en route.
NeDayGIG and Photography/Digital Imaging October 2009
By Ron Cummins
Unusually, this month Colin Lampshire could not conjure any
new Gizmos from his audience, so he launched immediately into the Q and A. This
session produced its general crop of the inexplicable but there was some useful
advice that it was advisable to clean up the hard drive before installing Win7.
Also, if you wished to make a DVD playable through a TV from the output of
Photostory 3,it was necessary to convert the proprietary file format by using a
3rd party program. After the break the floor was yielded to Dave Botherway who
was going to give us the briefing on Win 7 that he gave at the General monthly
meeting and which is accessable on the October Monthly disc. Dave has been
assisting MS for over 4 years as part of an expert advisory panel. Initially he
took us through the history of Windows and told us that in numbering the newest
version as 7, MS was reverting to the original naming sequence and that this
was indeed the 7th incarnation.( Vista being the 6th). The Win 7 enhancements
included a smaller footprint with better performance than Vista and more user
focussed improvements. Chief among the latter was the extensive use of
libraries for different classes of documents such as correspondence and
pictures and efficient search engines to find such items by name and date
anywhere in the computer. Home networks have been simplified to make media
sharing much easier. For the 32 bit version of Win 7 the computer needs at
least 1GHz CPU and at least 1GB of RAM ( more is better). It needs 16GB of HDD
space and a graphics card that will handle DirectX9. In fact the graphics card
memory is now part of the addressable memory. The 64 bit version needs at least
2GB of RAM. Dave recommends a dual boot if you already have Win XP. it cannot
be upgraded. Win7 has a different kernel. Just make a separate partition on the
HDD and instal Win 7 into this. It will save a lot of file transfer. The OS is
available in 3 versions. Home Premium and Pro, both retail products and
Ultimate, the corporate one. This is
just a very thin snapshot. If you wish to see Dave's polished and full delivery get the October
monthly disc.
NeDayGIG and Photography/Digital Imaging September 2009
By Ron Cummins
Colin Lampshire, our convenor, ran us briefly through thecontents of the Sept. monthly disc, and, there being no gizmos forthcoming,
launched immediately into the Q and A. A lively session resulted. The questions
ran the usual gamut from the systematic to the incomprehensible. One member sought
in vain to find if anyone had Win XP on
a memory stick. Another was having
problems with Internet Explorer8 and received one answer to stay away
from it and another from a member who had had no problems with it. Still on IE8
a member asked what accelerators were and received the answer that they were
add-ons to assist downloads with Win7. Colin then demonstrated the power of
Capture in the latest version of Faststone using it to record a 35page PDF
document as a jpeg and saving it in Powerpoint, file or clipboard. After the
break Kathy Rouse, an active member of the Video Production SIG, gave an
entertaining demonstration of the use of Photostory 3 for Windows. This free
program has a capability to import and arrange your photos and then add
narrative and music to the story. The product may then ,with the help of a DVD
authoring program, be burned to disc. She showed that the program had a
remarkable flexibility. It will support up to 300 photos and will capture them
at captive resolution but will output at 720x576, so it is possible to do some
editing beforehand to limit the file size. Reordering on the timeline is easily
achieved by drag and drop. Effects can be added from a drop down menu and there
is even an autoedit for the impatient. Music is added either by importing or by
creating automatic music in different styles. Motion may be added by panning across
a picture. The product can even be imported into Moviemaker for some more
sophisticated editing. Kathy's emphasis was that the program was easily
mastered. As usual it was another very informative meeting
NeDayGIG and Photography/Digital Imaging July 2009
By Ron Cummins
Colin Lampshire opened the meeting with the news that the Group would be offering a Workshop course on Photoshop CS3 to its members.Sessions would be monthly and the first meeting would be held on Monday 3rd of August. The time would be 9.30 to 11.30 am and those interested should indicate this to him. Both Peter Bellmont and Shaw Tan would be involved and members should, if possible, bring along a laptop and a flash drive. A portable version of CS3 will be provided and those members without a laptop will be given the opportunity to sit alongside a member with one. He then moved onto the Gizmos section and announced that both he and Shaw Tan had purchased slide and film scanners from Aldi and, being dissatisfied, had returned them and been given a credit against future purchases. Another member pronounced satisfaction with a second-hand computer with a Core2 Duo CPU he had bought at the Bundoora Swap Meet for $300 and yet another with a USB-powered Cooling Stand for a laptop that he had bought at Aldi. The Q and A session that followed was its usual mix of the systematic and idiosyncratic.
After the break the floor was taken by Trudy Schuringa, a professional photographer.Using her extensive experience she was happy to indulge us in an extensive Q and A session which covered a a wide range of aspects of the art. She advised that when buying a camera the aperture was more important than the number of Mpixels. The quality of the lens is the key and the smaller the ratio of focal length to the lens diameter the more expensive the lens becomes. When it came to portraits her view was that the use of reflectors was critical to ensure a good balance of illumination of the subject. If flash is required use a swivel flash as a bounce light. Never shoot a portrait straight on. Always get the subject to look away from the camera and try to get them to relax. In this aspect digital photography excelled as it is practicable to shoot a large number of exposures during the process of relaxing even though only one will be used. When it comes to landscapes shoot in the early morning or late afternoon when the colours and shadows are much better. Fast action shots need a lot of light and a high shutter speed and any panning needs a tripod.She had thoughtfully provided info sheets that illustrated her subject matter.