December 2006
December 28, 2006: "Show & Tell" at 225 Allyn Hall, W.S.U.
This month we met at Wright State University for the first time in
a few months. The topic was "Show & Tell". Attendees
were invited to bring their new photography goodies and show them off.
Details of this meeting will be posted in a few days.
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November 2006
November 30, 2006: "Make Your Own Holiday Cards" at 119 Valley St.
This month we met on Thursday, Nov. 30 (the
5th Thursday), instead
of our usual date because of Thanksgiving Day. This month's topic was
"Make Your Own Holiday Cards". We were asked to bring any
pictures that might be candidates to make into cards. Also, anyone
who has copies of Microsoft Publisher, Print Shop, American Greetings
Software, or any other suitable card making software, was asked to
bring it to the meeting, or at least be prepared to discuss why you
like it. We showed the slide show of our members' photos for those of
you who missed the October DMA® meeting.
Details of this meeting will be posted soon.
If you have any suggestions for topics for future meetings,
or would like to do a presentation, please contact us.
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October 2006
October 26, 2006: "Show Your Rig" at 119 Valley St.
This month we were asked to bring in our camera and accessories and
be prepared to talk about them—what we like and don't like about
our equipment, etc.
Check back in a few days for a more detailed report.
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September 2006
September 28, 2006: "Show Your Photos" at 119 Valley St.
For this month's meeting, we brought in some of our favorite photos
from this summer to share. Dean Miller showed some really neat photos
of birds in his birdbath, the moon, and others. Dave Lundy showed
some of his hummingbird photos and videos, some of a hot air balloon
glow, and various others. Tom Thorpe showed some excellent photos of
the Blue Angels he had taken at the Vectren Dayton Air Show and some
awesome sunsets. Bill Taylor showed some photos of his smoking pipe
collection and asked for help with his lighting setup. See details
here.
We offered some suggestions, including using a light cone. See this page for info about light
cones and other lighting methods. We also showed him how to enhance
the contrast and detail of a photo using the histogram and gamma tools
in Paint Shop Pro or other photo editors and he was very pleased with
the result.
Nancy passed around a copy of the book PC Photo Best Tips &
Techniques for Digital Photography that she liked. She showed some
test photos she took using an exposure technique described in the book.
We decided to postpone the November meeting one week to avoid the conflict
with Thanksgiving Day.
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August 2006
August 24, 2006: "Roger's Gadgets" at 119 Valley St.
Effective this meeting, we have changed from the
1st to the
4th Thursday each month,
so we had two meetings this month, and we moved to 119 Valley St.
Roger Jensen started by asking what photo editors we use.
There were almost as many different products mentioned as attendees
- Photoshop Elements, HP, Paint Shop Pro, Photoshop PS2, CompuPic
Pro, GIMP, and others were named. Roger then demonstrated UpShot, an interesting new photo
editor by Bellamax. UpShot has
some very nice features, including a great red eye remover, but you need
a fairly high powered PC to run it. Download the free 30-day trial and
give it a try. Registration is $29.99.
Next, he talked briefly about Desktop Widgets, then
demonstrated HDRI using both
Photomatix and FDRTools. Of those two HDRI tools,
Roger strongly prefers Photomatix. It has a better user interface and
is more stable.
Roger then showed some of his photos using Picasa Web Albums. You must
first have a Gmail account before
you can get a Picasa Web Album, but both Gmail and Picasa Web Albums
are free. Although Gmail accounts get over 2GB of free e-mail storage,
Picasa accounts are only 250MB, but 6GB more space can be bought for
$25 per year.
Finally Roger talked about some of his many gadgets for
which be became known as 007 in our group. One is the Archos Multimedia
Jukebox, a pocket size 20GB photo, video, & music player that
was released shortly after the original iPod. He also discussed a standalone Sony VRD-MC1 DVD writer, which is available if anyone wants to buy it, and the 30GB iPod.
After Roger's presentation, Dave showed some hummingbird photos
and videos he had taken recently. You can see some of them here. He also
mentioned a photo outing he was going to attend at Caesar Creek Lake that
weekend hosted by Dayton Tripod
Camera Club. Nancy mentioned that Pinnacle Studio 9 is on sale for
only $2.99 at Tiger Direct.
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August 3, 2006: "Video Editing with Pinnacle Studio 9 Plus" (was to have been Adobe Premiere Elements 2.0) in 399 Millett Hall
Dave Lundy was scheduled to demonstrate video editing using
Adobe
Premier Elements 2.0 which he recently bought bundled with
Adobe
Photoshop Elements 4.0. However, due to technical
difficulties with his PC (not with Premiere Elements)
which necessitated a complete reinstall of XP, he demonstrated Pinnacle Systems
Studio 9 Plus, instead.
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July 2006
July 6, 2006: "Microsoft Digital Image Suite 10" in 225 Allyn Hall
See the results of this month's challenge here.
This month's meeting featured a presentation on Microsoft Digital Image
Suite 10 by Nancy Christolear, courtesy of the Microsoft Mindshare
program.
Some other topics discussed were:
- Nancy mentioned the Provident
Photo Day at the Cincinnati Zoo this Sunday, July 9.
- Nancy showed some prints made on the HP PhotoSmart 325 Compact Photo
Printer she showed at our January meeting. They had very nice color.
- Dean Miller said he has had excellent results with prints made at the Meijer on Needmore.
- Nancy proposed changing the SIG meeting date from
the 1st to the 4th Thursday to avoid conflicting with the Focus Photo Club, which meets
at Cox Arboretum the 1st Thursday of most months. Also, it seems our
Genealogy SIG has been eyeing the 1st Thursday for their meetings.
Those in attendance had no objection to the date change.
- There was some discussion of RAW
files—Nancy had found some shareware programs for working
with them. Dean said they provide considerable more exposure latitude,
but because of their huge size, he rarely uses them. Many professional
photographers do, however. Also, there is no universally accepted RAW
format, so not all software will work with all camera files.
- Dave Lundy showed a few 8x10" and
5x7" prints of fireworks photos he took at WPAFB's Tattoo and at the
CityFolk
Festival in Dayton, and a slideshow video he created using Photoshop
Elements 4.0. He used the fireworks mode of both the Canon S2 IS and
Panasonic DMC-FZ20 with equally good results. If your camera doesn't
have a fireworks mode, he suggested using ISO 50, aperture of f8,
and 2 seconds exposure. If possible, set your camera to manual focus.
In any case, use a tripod.
- Nancy mentioned a low cost external drive case with integral card
readers she found at geeks.com and requested that you access geeks.com
via their link on the Dayton
LANfest site. Also, she mentioned that DLF is looking for
photographers for DLF-VI July 28-30.
- The topic of lack of Internet access at the meetings came up again.
We were not able to view the monthly photo edit project. What can
be done?
- Nancy showed a collage she created for the Photoshop class she took
at Sinclair Community College.
- Dean talked briefly about his Epson
Perfection 4490 scanner with 4800 x 9600 resolution and 16-bit output.
He showed some sample scans he had made with it and a dedicated film
scanner, but due to the low resolution of the projector we could not
see the difference.
- Dave Lundy plans to demonstrate video editing using Adobe Premiere Elements
2.0 at our August meeting.
- Roger Jensen offered to do a presentation of some of his gadgets
for the September meeting.
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June 2006
June 1, 2006: "TBA" in 495 Millett Hall
See the results of this month's challenge here.
I was unable to attend the June meeting and I have not received a meeting summary from anyone who did attend.
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May 2006
May 4, 2006: "Q&A" in 495 Millett Hall
The challenge this month was to create a composite photo from the samples
supplied or your own, and describe your process.
See the results of this month's challenge here.
Nancy Christolear discussed how she created her composite image using
GIMP
and discussed briefly some differences between resizing images in GIMP
and Paint Shop Pro. She also
showed quick mask selection and pen tool for selecting shapes in GIMP.
A few other topics discussed include:
- Nancy mentioned a neat on-line tool, WhatTheFont, to help
identify unknown fonts.
- Gary Turner mentioned that Wal-Mart will soon start
selling build-your-own PCs in some of their stores (see here for more
details).
- Dave Lundy showed a few training videos (developed by Lynda.com) for Paint Shop Pro X that
are included with the program.
- Dave showed a photo of a bumblebee
in flight he had recently taken.
- Dave also played a portion of a mashup of the
songs Imagine and Walk on the Wild Side
“sung” by George W. Bush that he had heard that
morning on WYSO. More info here.
It has nothing to do with digital photography except that this guy did
to music and spoken word what we do with pixels.
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April 2006
April 6, 2006: "Color models and file formats for printing"
See the results of this month's challenge here.
For the main topic, Nancy talked briefly about some of the differences
between the color models RGB which is additive and used for web images,
projectors, CRTs, LCDs, etc., and CMYK
(A.K.A. CYMK) which is a subtractive process used by printing and
painting. She showed some samples.
Some other topics discussed were:
- We viewed and discussed the results of the monthly photo edit challenge.
- Steve Hayden showed some amusing disaster photos.
- We watched a few Paint Shop Pro tutorials from paintshoppro.info.
- We watched the first CD of a Photoshop
for Portrait Photographers tutorial CD by Todd
Morrison. The CD set was one of many excellent tutorials by Software Cinema.
- One item mentioned in the
above mentioned tutorial that we discussed was using Gretag-Macbeth
ColorChecker Chart for setting color balance instead of a neutral
gray card.
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March 2006
March 2, 2006: "Bring your best photos"
See the results of the March photo edit challenge here.
This month we were invited to bring our best photos to show off, and
about half a dozen of us did - Dave Lundy, Tom Thorpe, Micheal Bell,
Jim Gundel, Dean Miller, Jim Scherer, and a fellow from NCR with some
incredible monsoon photos.
- Dave showed how to do an instantaneous slide show from
a collection of pictures in Windows XP using just the Windows Picture and FAX Viewer.
Unless you have installed a photo editor or viewer that changed the
Windows defaults, Windows Picture & Fax Viewer is the default photo
viewer in Windows. If you've already changed the default viewer, but
for some reason would like to use Windows Picture & FAX Viwere, see this
article.
- The local PC Club stores closed
without warning.
- Dean mentioned monitor calibration with the ColorVision
Spyder.
- Nancy talked about converting used laptops
to display photos on a wall as described at Laptop
on a Wall - WallTop.
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February 2006
February 2, 2006: "Lighting Color Correction"
A few people tried their hand at improving the photo shown here of a lady hand
painting Christmas plates in Copenhagen. We reviewed the results at the meeting.
See the results here.
This month we discussed possible ways to color correct photos
taken in troublesome lighting, such as in a room with a combination of
incandescent and fluorescent lighting on the subject. We were to bring
examples that we have fixed and explain how we did it, or examples we
would like help with.
We briefly revisited the Blenheim
Palace photo from January and discussed some additional
techniques. We watched a couple Photoshop editing lessons from the Photo
Illustration set of CDs from Software Cinema by Jim
DiVitale. He demonstrated some amazing techniques that were way above
my current editing capabilities. I would need to watch several times to
fully comprehend everything he discussed. Some other topics discussed
were:
- Someone asked about a Photoshop plugin to make fonts look like mercury
or chrome. If you know of a suitable plugin, please mention it on our
mailing list.
- Someone mentioned a Paint Shop Pro tutorial for changing black &
white photos to color.
- Someone talked about using the skewing tool in Photoshop to correct
perspective and showed some examples.
- Dean Miller talked about adjusting highlights, shadows, & midtones to correct lighting problems.
- Dean also mentioned monitor calibration using a product such as Spyder2
or similar.
- Nancy showed a USB cable with multiple ends to fit various devices that she found at Big Lots for $10.
- Nancy also talked about the "Filter Pack
Simulation" plug-in for the GIMP.
- Someone mentioned that Adobe Photo Album Starter Edition 3 can make
PDF slideshows.
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January 2006
January 5, 2006: "Christmas Show and Tell"
A few people tried fixing the photo of Blenheim Palace shown here.
See the results here
At last month's meeting Dean Miller mentioned that Paint Shop Pro has a
tool to remove the purple fringing noticeable on both sides of this photo.
This month's topic was Christmas Show and Tell. We brought
in our new gadgets and Christmas photos. Nancy showed her HP PhotoSmart 325 Compact Photo
Printer, Dave showed the compact stabilized 6x optical zoom Panasonic DMC-LZ2 camera he got
his wife, Jim Scherer described how he made custom Christmas cards,
and Dave Lundy, Dean Miller, and Steve Hayden showed some of their
Christmas pictures.
We talked a little about many different topics, including:
- Joe Solch talked briefly about how layers in Paint.net - a very
good free image editing program - differ from most other photo
editors. (That difference has been fixed since then)
Dave showed how he uses a wide rubber band around his thumb drive to
help prevent it from slipping out of his pocket, as it did last month.
He found it a week later wedged between the seat cushion and arm of
his recliner.- Dave also mentioned Autostitch, which he had mentioned a few months ago on the Photo-SIG mailing list. It's an
amazing free program that automatically stitches together a batch of
photos to create panoramas. There are now a couple commercial programs
based on this research project.
- Steve mentioned some applications such as Portable
Thunderbird (an open source e-mail client), Portable Firefox (an open source
web browser), IrfanView
(an excellent free image browser & more), Password
Corral (a free password manager), and
others (all
free designed to run from a USB flash drive (AKA thumb drive).
In most cases they don't require installation on a hard drive.
Simply copy the portable application to your thumb drive and run it on
any PC with a USB port. No data is written to the PC's hard drive.
See more info at www.u3.com and here.
- Joe Solch mentioned FastStone Image Viewer, an
image browser, converter and editor, and FastStone
Screen Capture that he likes. Both are free at FastStone.org. He also likes Serif
PhotoPlus 6 a free image editor. A much newer version (10)
with more features sells for $80.
- Joe also mentioned that the "media detector" in the current version of
Picasa can be annoying.
Dave agreed - so are other "media detectors".
- Nancy brought up the topic of colorizing b/w photos. John Cramer had
mentioned Recolored which is currently in beta
testing. Mailman was configured to automatically strip HTML, so the text
of John's message wasn't archived, but the sample photos were. Joe also
mentioned Coloriage,
a PhotoShop plug in, and added that he's tried a few such tools and has
found them all difficult and time consuming to use.
- Jim Scherer showed us some pictures from his NAPP
Portfolio. He also described a technique for removing purple fringing
from photos by sampling the offending color and painting with that color
on a new layer, but I didn't get enough detail to explain it here.
Jim also briefly outlined the process he used to create the custom
Christmas card shown here.- Jim Gundel showed some photos from his recent trip to England.
- Several people joined a discussion (don't remember who started
it) about how to deal with photos with differing light sources, such
as incandescent & incandescent. It was decided this would be the
topic of next month's meeting, but I don't recall anyone being named as
the presenter.
- On a somewhat related note, Jim Gundel showed some historical
documents he had photographed that suffered from improper color balance,
bleed through, etc. To prevent bleed through, it was suggested to
use black paper behind the document being photographed or scanned, but
that's not always possible. Using flash would help with color balance,
but flash is usually not allowed when photographing old documents.
Using a neutral gray card to manually set color balance should help in
most cases. Boosting exposure may be needed some times.
- Steve showed a slide show of a collection of mostly amusing pictures
from various sources.
- Joe showed some very nice 8x10 prints he had made. Jim Scherer showed
some 8x10 prints he had made with framing done using the history brush.
I didn't really understand the process.
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