DMA® Digital Photography SIG Events of 2005

Here are summaries of our events we had in 2005. We usually meet from 7:00—9:00 pm the first Thursday each month at Wright State University unless stated otherwise. Here is a PDF map of the campus and here is a map of the tunnel system. All meetings are free and open to the public unless stated otherwise.

• Current Events
• December 1, 2005 "digiKam, etc."
• November 3, 2005 "Photo Organization"
• October 6, 2005 "Corel Corporation"
• September 1, 2005 "Photo Story 3"
• August 4, 2005 "Photo Shoot in Quad at 6 & Favorite Editing Techniques"
• July 7, 2005 "Dreamweaver"
• June 2, 2005 "Videography: Lessons Learned"
• May 5, 2005 "Regroup & Pixifun demo"
• April 7, 2005 "Technology Roundup", by Dan Forshaw
• March 3, 2005 Miscellaneous: was supposed to be "Pinnacle Studio MediaSuite"
• February 3, 2005 "5 Minute Edit", by Joe Solch
• January 6, 2005 "Show & Tell - What Santa Brought"
• 2004 Events
• 2003 Events

December 2005

December 3, 2005: "digiKam, etc."

A few people tackled this month's challenge with widely varying results, which you can see here.

For the main presentation, Nancy Christolear demonstrated digiKam, a free open-source photo management application for Linux. It has many of the same capabilities as Picasa and Corel Photo Album 6 that Dave demonstrated last month, plus a few neat tricks of its own - many of them via optional plugins.

Nancy had suggested bringing in photos to send out this year for holiday greetings or just some that need fixing to do some work on them. She showed a technique for bringing out details in the shadows of a picture using the brightness adjustment curve and shaping it similar to the one shown here. In addition, Ken Greene showed a couple photo restorations he had done. On one, he had removed many bad creases or scratches, and the other he had nicely colorized. Leo and Mary Ann Parts showed some of their Christmas pictures.

Dean Miller suggested browsing pictures of accidents at micom.net/oops. Most, but not all, are aeronautical. Some are pretty hilarious! Dean also showed some fall pictures from his recent trip to West Virginia. Jim Sherer showed some very nice pictures of snow and cats he had taken at Carriage Hill Farm. At least one of them was published. Way to go, Jim! Nancy recommended the "Digital Photography Bible, Second Edition" by Ken Milburn & Ron Rockwell. Dave Lundy reminded us of the Corel presentation DVDs he had made. Gary Turner mentioned the DMA Holiday Dinner next week and had tickets for sale. GT also passed out PC Club flyers for those who missed the main DMA meeting Tuesday. Finally, Dean won the door prize - a copy of NTI CD & DVD Maker 7.

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November 2005

November 3, 2005: "Photo Organization"

Several people submitted entries for this month's challenge shown here. You may see the results here.

Dave Lundy briefly demonstrated two programs for organizing your photos—Picasa (free from Google) and Corel Photo Album 6. Nancy Christolear was going to also demonstrate digiKam, but found that it wasn't installed on her laptop. The first two are Windows applications, and the last is a Linux application. All claim to allow you to easily organize your photo collection on your computer. Since Dave has 25.5GB (about 21,000 photos) in his My Pictures directory of his PC and 17.5GB (about 18,400 photos) on his wife's PC, it's probably time he started using one. Dave was primarily looking at speed and ease of use. Another products mentioned was IrfanView, which Dave didn't have on his laptop. It's a versatile photo viewer and it's free for non-commercial use. It was mentioned because it can display both Exif and IPTC info embedded within photos.

Dave Lundy videotaped the Corel meeting last month and will have DVDs available for $2 per copy for those who have requested them and a couple extras. Dave wasn't too pleased with the raw video quality—not much contrast or sharpness—so he used the free program VirtualDub to adjust the levels and sharpen the image, then created the DVD using Pinnacle Studio.

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October 2005

October 6, 2005: "Corel Corp."

Dayton Microcomputer Association had a special presentation of Corel Corporation products on Thursday, October 6, which happened to be the same night as our meeting, so we combined meetings. Tanya Lux, from Corel, expertly demonstrated Paint Shop Pro X (formerly JASC Paint Shop Pro), Photo Album 6, and Corel Painter Essentials 3. See more details here. Corel has made some very nice improvements to Paint Shop Pro.

Dave Lundy videotaped the presentation and will have DVDs available for $2 each.

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September 2005

September 1, 2005: "Photo Story 3"

See the results of this month's challenge here. We spent several minutes reviewing what some of our members had done. Nancy Christolear simulated a shallow depth of field (DOF) using this GIMP Tutorial.

For our main presentation, Dean Miller demonstrated Microsoft's "Photo Story 3", a Windows XP program to create animated slideshows. You can download it here. Dean created a slide show of a trip to New York using effects such as fade from b/w to color, zoom and pan, and background music, in just a few minutes. He mentioned that there's a $20 plugin from Sonic to create DVDs of your slide shows.

Dean mentioned the Taildraggers fly-in at Red Stewart Airfield in Waynesville, which prompted Dave Lundy to mention the 10th annual D.O.G.S. show at the National Museum of the United States Air Force. He showed a few pictures from a previous show, and will have pictures of this year's show in his gallery soon. Dave also showed a few short movie clips he had shot with his Canon S2 IS. Gary Turner is looking for some small Compact Flash cards, such as the ridiculously small card that came with your new camera, for a project he's working on. Dean asked about file recovery software. PhotoRescue and ImageRecall have both gotten good reviews and have free trial modes. Those and others are listed at Steve's DigiCams Software page.

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August 2005

August 4, 2005: "Photo Shoot in Quad at 6 & Favorite Editing Techniques"

A few of us met in the quad before the meeting for an informal photo shoot. But due to threatening rain, not many pictures were taken. After the very limited photo session we went inside for the main presentation. It was planned to have been have members demonstrate some of their favorite editing techniques for The GIMP, Paint Shop Pro, Photoshop Elements, etc. and a contest to see who best edited this photo of the month.

As it turned out, only Nancy demonstrated some of her favorite techniques with the GIMP. Unfortunately, she experienced some technical difficulties and wasn't able to complete her demo. She was trying to demonstrate splitting a picture into R, B, and G and using threshold for selecting objects as masks, but apparently the Windows version of The GIMP isn't as stable as the Linux version. We reviewed the edits that several people made. You can see most of them here. Paul Ahlquist wasn't present to discuss his effort using matting created via CSS displayed on his web site.

In addition, Dean Miller showed some bird photos he ahd taken and talked a bit about a remote shutter release he built by modifying an IR remote. Rufus Walker showed some airplane photos he had taken at EEA AirVenture Oshkosh 2005. Nancy showed the pictures she took earlier this evening on the quad. Dave Lundy showed some flowers he shot using telephoto instead of macro. Susan Kendall tried to show some of her pictures, but couldn't due to some PC problem. Someone asked a question about "Filmstrip View" in Windows XP explorer - I think it may have been how to get into that mode. Dave Lundy mentioned that he's experienced problems when using that mode. If attempting to copy multiple files into a directory that is in "Filmstrip View" mode, only the first file will be copied, so he seldom uses that mode.

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July 2005

July 7, 2005: "Dreamweaver"

We moved to 225 Allyn Hall this month. In spite of the construction at WSU which closed the road to the guest parking lot, over 20 people managed to find their way to tonight's meeting.

This meeting featured a demonstration of Macromedia (soon to be Adobe) Dreamweaver by Rammy Meyerowitz. After a delayed start due to various difficulties with his laptop, Rammy showed us an overview of Dreamweaver's capabilities and how to use Dreamweaver to display photos on-line using Susan Kendall's laptop. Thanks Susan! Rammy is now webmaster of GasPriceWatch.com. He showed us some pictures in a gallery he created. For those not wanting to invest in a program as expensive as Dreamweaver, Rammy suggested a text editor with syntax highlighting, such as TextPad. Also, there were several submissions of alternate edits of the image shown here, provided by Jim Gundel. See them here. After viewing and discussing the various creative edits, Dave Lundy showed a few of the many photos he took during his recent vacation in Toronto. Some of them are on his Toronto gallery.

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June 2005

June 2, 2005: "Videography: Lessons Learned"

This meeting was a group discussion of things we have learned about videography through personal experience. Also, there was a contest to see who could best edit the image shown here. Several people submitted their work, which can be seen in our gallery.

Some lessons learned included:

• Use a good tripod. Dave Lundy related how a video he saw a friend had taped was badly marred by the creaks and groans of a cheap tripod.
• Check the lens cap Dave detailed his personal embarrassment of shooting a couple minutes of the inside of his lens cap thinking the reason he didn't see an image in the LCD was because of the bright sun. Admittedly, the image was faint after finally removing the cap, but it's really easy to check.
• Edit small batches. A couple people suggested editing small bits at a time rather than biting off a two hour project at once. Then the small segments can be combined into the finished project. Less chance of frayed nerves in case of a crash. This (and avoiding excessive transitions) can also help avoid lip synch errors, especially on a slow PC.
• Use Mini-DV instead of DVD or Digital-8 for best video quality.
• There was some discussion of problems involved in converting old motion picture film to video. Dave mentioned that DMA® member Gil Stuber provides that service at HMP Services.
• Beware of recording DVDs at too high a bit rate. Joe Solch told of his agonizing struggle to figure out why most of the first batch of DVDs he made wouldn't play in most standalone players but worked fine in his PC. He and others recommended videohelp.com for lots of useful info about DVDs.
• Run as few programs as possible while editing video. Jim Gundel recommended EndItAll 2 for shutting down unneeded processes.

Several other topics were discussed, including:

• Joe Solch described Portable Firefox, a USB drive optimized version of the open source Firefox web browser and Portable Thunderbird, a USB drive optimized version of the open source Thunderbird e-mail client. Download them to your "Thumb Drive" and copy your bookmarks to it and you may browse the web using Firefox and read your mail using Thunderbird on any USB equipped computer even if it's not installed, and have access to all your bookmarks and contacts.
• There was some discussion of the wildly varying quality of scanned genealogy documents available. Several examples from HeritageQuest available via Washington-Centerville Public Library were displayed. Someone suggested using a clear yellow filter when scanning old brown paper documents to improve legibility.
• It was announced that Digital Shutterbugs, the new group that Millard started, meets at 7 pm on the third Wednesdays.

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May 2005

May 5, 2005: "Regroup & Pixifun demo"

The May 5^th meeting devoted some time to regrouping since Millard suddenly announced his departure as SIG leader last month. In addition, we were scheduled to have a demonstration of Pixifun. Some door prizes were to have been awarded at this meeting. After I've received GT's meeting summary, I'll add more details - I was unable to attend this meeting.

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April 2005

April 7, 2005: "Technology Roundup"

Apple representative Dan Forshaw, based in the Dayton Mall area CompUSA, presented a "Technical Roundup" of hot new hardware and software for both Apple and PC. Dan demonstrated the iLife Apple software suite, which consists of iTunes, iPhoto, iMovie HD, iDVD, & GarageBand. He also talked a bit about the iPod, which works with both Macs and PCs. After his presentation, Dan awarded several nice prizes.

In addition to Dan's interesting presentation, several other topics were discussed, including:

• Tom Sheibenberger mentioned a Casio CD printer. I don't recall hearing a specific model, but I suspect it was the CW-50, which has a SRP of $79.99 or the CW-75 with a SRP of $99.99. Tom also mentioned some memory card bargains he found at TigerDirect.com.
• Dave Lundy mentioned that a new driver for the Epson Photo R200 which he discussed briefly the previous month, fixed the too dark photo printing problem he was having. Dave also showed several prints he had made with it, using the new driver.
• Millard discussed some of the differences between most digital cameras and DSLRs. In addition to interchangeable lenses and optical viewfinders, a major difference is that DSLRs only activate the image sensor during the exposure, rather than all the time the camera is on. This has two significant advantages. It uses much less power, resulting in longer battery life, and tends to create less image noise, since the sensor doesn't heat up as much.
• Millard briefly mentioned Cherry OS, emulation software that allows PCs to run Mac software under Windows.
• If you found a credit card sized remote control at the March meeting, please contact Millard. He lost the remote for his Olympus camera.

Millard announced that this meeting would be his last as SIG leader, and expressed his dissatisfaction with the current DMA® leadership. Shortly after the meeting, Tom Sheibenberger offered to fill in as SIG leader temporarily.

Millard then announced that he is trying to form a new independent group that he proposes to call "Dayton Digital Photographers". He is holding a meeting in the Frisch's on Col. Glenn at 8 pm Thursday, April 21 to discuss details of forming the new group. He invited anyone interested to attend.

A couple days after the meeting, I found an article from smartcomputing.com about several types of printers capable of printing CD and DVD lables. It seemed appropriate to mention it here since printing lables had been mentioned at both this meeting and last month.

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March 2005

March 3, 2005: "Pinnacle Studio MediaSuite, by Dave Lundy"

We had originally planned to have CompUSA present "iPhoto, iMovie, & iDVD" for our March meeting, but that didn't work out. So, Dave Lundy volunteered to demonstrate Pinnacle Studio MediaSuite. MediaSuite is Studio Plus v.9 with additional features, including audio editing. Unfortunately, due to hardware failure, Dave was unable to demo Studio, so we had an impromptu meeting. He did show a small portion of a DVD he had created using Studio 8. Dave also briefly discussed the Epson Stylus Photo R200 printer which can print directly on CDs and DVDs with a special inkjet printable surface, and showed samples of a couple CDs & DVDs he had printed.

Jim Ullom described the upcoming photo shoot several of us will be participating in at Dayton LANfest (DLF-IV) March 18-20. Roger Jensen demonstrated the Epson PictureMate "personal photo lab" 4x6 inch photo printer that he bought for use at DLF. Roger has written an article about the PictureMate which should appear in the May issue of The DataBus.

There were many other topics discussed, including:

• Adobe has proposed replacing the numerous incompatible variations of RAW format with Digital Negative Specification, or DNG. See Adobe's press release.
• There was some discussion of DSLRs, including the Canon EOS, Nikon D70, etc.
• A new inkjet cartridge refiller, Island Inkjet, was mentioned that has recently opened shop at the Dayton Mall and Mall at Fairfield Commons. This is only an announcement - not an endorsement
• Tom Thorpe showed some scans he had made using a CanoScan 5000F
• Dean Miller talked briefly about Acronis True Image backup software.

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February 2005

February 3, 2005: "5 Minute Edit, by Joe Solch"

Joe invited us to bring some of our problem photo files and he would demonstrate how to fix them in 5 minutes or less - or suggest when it's time to give up, if appropriate. Joe used primarily Jasc Paint Shop Pro 9 to demonstrate numerous techniques to rescue photos from a multitude of problems. Some were quite easy to fix with just the One Step Photo Fix script, but most needed quite a bit more. Joe showed several cases where layers can work miracles, but he demonstrated many other tools and techniques also. It wasn't just a one man show, either. Several of the nearly 30 attendees offered suggestions during the evening.

Incorrect colors from old film or slides is one of the most difficult problems to correct because not all colors fade to the same degree. The color adjustment tool with a color temperature slider can help in some cases. The color matching tool (click on a particular are of the photo and select the appropriate preset color from a list of options such as grass, Caucasian skin, hot dog, mustard, etc) can help in others. But in more difficult situations, you may need to manually tweak curves for highlights, mid tones or shadows for the primary colors individually, which is a very tedious process.

A few very neat tools Joe demonstrated were:

• Digital Camera Noise Removal to easily remove the graininess that often occurs in low light situations

  Before noise removal	After noise removal
  This wasn't camera noise in this case, but the results were quite impressive anyway.

• Salt and Pepper filter to remove dust specks from scanned photos

  Before salt & pepper filter	After salt & pepper filter
  This wasn't dust. The photo had disintegrated!

• Scratch Remover makes fixing scratches and tears easier
• Crop tool that allows cropping to a specific aspect ratio but allows resizing and moving.
• Healing Brush in Adobe Photoshop Elements 3.0 makes removing facial blemishes extremely easy

Some of these have been available in previous versions. I wasn't aware that the size / aspect ratio presets for cropping nor the color matching presets are also in version 8 of Paint Shop Pro, which I've been using for nearly a year. The Digital Camera Noise Removal and Scratch Remover are new to Paint Shop Pro 9 and the Healing Brush is new to Photoshop Elements 3.0.

As usual at our meetings, several topics were discussed briefly in addition to the main presentation. Joe mentioned that it's often preferable to scan using 16 bit color depth, but that he had trouble with many operations in Paint Shop when he did that. He also mentioned that PSP 9 can't read .psp files from Photoshop Elements 3.0 (or was it the other way around?). Millard recounted his experience with a digital camera that he hadn't used for several months. He discovered that unless fresh batteries are kept in a camera the capacitors tend to degrade and the camera won't work until after having fresh batteries installed for a few days. He also asked if any of us would be interested in writing software reviews. He mentioned that one written by one of our members will be published in the March issue and tried to encourage more of them.

As of last night, CompUSA has not been confirmed to present at our March meeting, so alternate topics were requested. Dave Lundy volunteered to demonstrate Pinnacle Studio Plus v.9.

Some photographers and equipment will be needed at Dayton LANfest March 18^th - 20^th. Jim Ullom volunteered to coordinate the project. A planning meeting will be held at Millard's home Wednesday, February 9^th. Please contact Jim if you wish to help.

Several of us went to Frisch's after the meeting where we saw the Wienermobile nearby.

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January 2005

January 6, 2005: "Show & Tell"

Our January meeting was "What Santa Brought Me For Christmas". Many of us purchased, or received as gifts, new photographic equipment for the holidays. This was your chance to come and share your joy (or sadness?) with others by telling us what you like and dislike about your new toys.

Although attendance was lower than average, we had a wide assortment of goodies to ogle (or, in some cases have described to us). Some of them are mentioned here, in no particular order:

• GSpot Codec Information Appliance is a free utility program that identifies what video codecs (audio and video) are required to play an AVI file. - mentioned by Joe Solch
• 2.2 GB USB hard drive fob - neat!
• Auto Refill System, an external ink system for inkjet printer. Kits are available for several Canon and Epson models
• Wacom Graphire digitizing tablet
• Photoshop Elements 3.0 Joe Solch said he likes it a lot better than 2.0, and the healing tool is great
• Nikon D70 Awesome camera with incredibly fast sequential shots!!!
• Craftsman Clip-On Light or Craftsman Long Life LED/Lighted Frames
• CameraBright X1, a tiny bright LED array that attaches to your camera's tripod mount to help compose and focus in low light

Several other topics were discussed to varying degrees, in addition to the show & tell session. There was some some followup discussion of the scanners thread that was started on our mailing list several days ago. Nancy mentioned Inkscape, an open source scalable vector drawing program. There was some discussion of video editing software. Dave Lundy mentioned that he had made a couple DVDs using Pinnacle Studio 8 and was pleased with the result, except for some trouble with the title editor. Someone indicated that Pinnacle Studio 9 is much more stable than Studio 8. Dave also mentioned that he had just learned of the Columbus Movie Club during a visit to Malone Photo Supply looking for a camcorder tripod. The Manfrotto / Bogen tripods and fluid heads he found there were sweet, but quite a bit more expensive than he had planned to spend. Steve Hayden suggested a meeting where we show off some of our favorite photos. Joe Solch suggested a meeting where we would bring in photos and critique them to discuss how they could be improved by using different composition, lighting, focus, cropping, etc. Joe mentioned a $35 download of Jasc Paint Shop Pro Studio. That is only to upgrade from a previous version of Paint Shop Pro. Also, please be aware that Paint Shop Pro Studio is not the same as Paint href="http://www.jasc.com/products/paintshoppro/">Paint Shop Pro 9. See a summary of the differences here. The download version of Jasc Paint Shop Pro 9 is $55. Millard mentioned a problem he has seen with the FireWire port on SoundBlaster Audigy cards. Joe Solch mentioned problems he's encountered when trying to burn DVDs connected via USB 2.0. The same DVD writer worked fine when connected via FireWire. Millard stated that extended warranties for electronics items cost much less at Sam's Club than almost anywhere else. Finally, Millard asked for someone else to take over leadership of this SIG.

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