U3A Digital Photo Group – 27Th November Meeting Notes Page 1 of 5
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U3A Digital Photo Group – 27th November Meeting Notes Page 1 of 5 Introduction We had a good attendance on Monday (especially considering the weather) and it was quite a lively session, covering 3 main areas: - The Imaginative Image manipulation “exercise” on the “Stock Image” sent to you with last month’s Notes - The competition for fireworks images - Creating a Christmas (or other) greetings card Imaginatively editing a “Stock Image” This “exercise” was about using your editing software to produce quite different results to the original shot. This was a good opportunity for both the editing (or “Post Processing” as it is often called) experts and for those with little experience of editing images to just “ignore the rule book” and produce something totally striking, interesting or just plain “weird” – and we certainly had a few of the latter submitted ☺. The “Stock Image” was the funerary mask of Brunelleschi (1446) in the Duomo museum in Florence, and 6 members sent in a total of 13 edited images and 3 video clips(!) . These were displayed on the screen (often to lots of laughter, comments, and applause!) , and the submitters then outlined which software they had used and how they had achieved their results. The verbal outlines were brief, but most of the submitted images, and especially the videos, must actually have taken far longer, and involved a great deal of effort, to produce – and so many thanks to the submitters for all the work they put in, and for the education and entertainment that they provided to the other members. Two of the submissions will also form part of the PowerPoint presentation at the Dec U3A Monthly meeting at the Winston Churchill Hall (WCH) – see the “Competition” section below for an explanation. In the context of the software used, it appears to have been mainly a mixture of Adobe Photoshop &/or Photoshop Elements, FastStone Image Viewer and IrfanView – the last (and new, to the rest of us) having been recommended by Adele and she used that for image-manipulation images that she submitted for this meeting. The last 3 are free to download and if you would like to know more about both free and paid-for software that could be useful, then go to the Appendix at the end of this email where there is a short list of both free and purchasable image editing and manipulation software downloads that we know that members do, or could, use. Creating Christmas cards using software Alan did something similar at last November’s meeting and so I thought we would have another shot at the subject from slightly different angles – so I “borrowed” his presentation (with his kind help and permission, of course!), modified it somewhat (as attached) and then extrapolated it (but only with moderate success, it has to be said, due to many unrelated time-constraints) to cover creating cards, which I think he originally did in MS WORD, but using other software. However, I changed things around a bit and pointed out that you do need to decide beforehand on the s/w (be-it your normal photo s/w package, or a prebuilt, and purchased, commercial package of which I listed some examples) or by other means (like using an on-line printing service ) that you will use to create a card because that choice determines a lot of what you can, or cannot do, in the creation process – a copy of that short presentation is attached. I then went on to show you could create a card in PhotoShop Elements (Version 11 ), and then roughly the same thing again in the “Draw” programme within the free software package LibreOffice (which can be downloaded here: https://www.libreoffice.org/donate/dl/win- x86_64/5.3.7/en-GB/LibreOffice_5.3.7_Win_x64.msi ) U3A Digital Photo Group – 27th November Meeting Notes Page 2 of 5 It seemed a bit hard-going in Elements to me, but I think showed how you can: - Create a basic A4 page for an eventual folding into an A6-size 4-page card, - Open a number of individual Christmas images files (mainly downloaded from the internet) as additional pages within Elements. - Crop, rotate (where necessary) and then move the images onto the template page where they become individual “layers” (that taught me a lot more about working with layers than I ever knew before – so could be very useful in the long-term!), - Adjust the locations and sizes of each image in their intended positions on the page, and add text boxes where appropriate. That took some time to set up before the meeting and then (not entirely successfully because of a shortage of time – and skill L) to show how I had done it. I then showed, again rather roughly, how you could basically recreate the same card in LibreOffice Draw in approximately ¼ of the overall time, and with much less work involved! It’s actually just a matter of creating the template page and then inserting, re-sizing (and sometimes changing the orientation of) each image (I used the same ones as before) and then simply dragging it to the required position! Overall, seems a very quick and easy to have a first shot at card creation, and then, maybe you can try something more complex. The day’s Competition – “Fireworks” The previously-announced Competition theme was “Fireworks”, but unfortunately we only had a total of 6 entries from 2 members – probably because there were not many local displays this year and the weather was generally pretty awful around the beginning of November. Anyway, we did have a Vote and the Winners were: - 1st Susan Madigan - 2nd Margaret Mayes However, as we aim to submit 4 images for each U3A monthly meeting at the WCH, it was suggested and agreed that 2 of the Image Manipulation submissions should also be included – so we reviewed those again and then had another vote, and the 2 Winners this time were: - 1st Adele Franklin - 2nd Brian Hillier NB: regrettably, we had to exclude the two (very good!) image manipulation videos from the voting as it was felt that, although PowerPoint presentations can include such clips, it would be premature to ask the presentation preparation team to include them at such short notice and without their formal agreement. Therefore the 4 images in question will be sent to the new email address ([email protected] )- giving the names of the Winners, the Competition name, and the places achieved. On this occasion I already have the image files here and so I will submit them myself – and thus no-else needs to bother to do that! What should we cover in meetings in the future? We had a very short discussion on future activities, and so this a reminder for the: U3A Digital Photo Group – 27th November Meeting Notes Page 3 of 5 December Meeting and Competition – NB: MONDAY 18 th DEC (not the 25 th !) Theme (well, sort of!): As usual we will make this a more social event with: - Everyone try to bring some finger food and soft drinks (and a few paper plates, plastic knives/forks/cups etc., would not go amiss!) – please email me with what you think you are likely to bring so we know if we might be getting too much of something but not enough of something else! - A “ What is it? ” photo image quiz. Please take shots of “everyday” or other objects from unusual angles &/or lighting &/or very close-up, and make it as difficult as possible for people viewing the images to guess what they actually are - and then send the image files to me at any time before Monday 11 th Dec. Competition: “Make a Xmas Card” Like the competition last December, this will be for you to make an Xmas card to bring along in printed form to exchange with someone else – hopefully the ad-hoc presentation that I gave (see above) will help a few people who have not done this before. NB: there are pdfs on “Making Greetings Cards” on the Salisbury Group website http://salisburyu3a.org.uk/U3ADI/DigPhoto38.html . Unfortunately when I tried them out, I didn’t actually find those to be much help as they appear to be based around quite early versions of PhotoShop Elements and some of the instructions did not match to well with Version 11 that I was using. January Meeting Theme: “Night shooting” Competition: Christmas images, with an emphasis on “night shooting” to get you in the frame of mind for the January theme. February Meeting: Theme: High Dynamic Range (HDR), and other image manipulation techniques such as “diffusion, “levels” & so on Competition: TBD – but possibly “Night shooting” with the emphasis on subjects other than Christmas! Reminder: Diary Dates – Monthly meetings – the 4th Monday of each month (except Dec this year, & 2-3 months in 2018 – see below!) 2017 - Dec 18. 2018 - Jan 22, Feb 26, March 26, April 23, May 21? , June 25, Jul 23, (Aug – no mtg), Sept 24, Oct 22, Nov 26, Dec 17. As mentioned in the October Notes, there is an issue about the May 2018 meeting because the normal date is a Bank Holiday – this has yet to be resolved. All the best and see you on MONDAY 18 th December ! John Allen And on behalf of the other members of the Steering Committee: Judy Peddie, Adele Franklin, Len Fenton, Jothy Rainbow PS: we would welcome anyone else who would like to join the Committee because it’s aim is to take a “collective” approach to what we do, and how we do it – so please do consider helping us -------------------------------------------------------------------------- U3A Digital Photo Group – 27th November Meeting Notes Page 4 of 5 Appendix – Useful Free and Paid-for software for Image editing, manipulation and similar tasks This is a list of software that members use, and is either free to download and use or else has to be bought.