NVMUG eNews 3/16/2002
Last updated 3/17/2002
How To Learn Photoshop
Warren Walker, Barry Hayes, and Michele Moore provided information about how to learn Photoshop, and showed outstanding examples of why you might want to learn Photoshop. Midge Lubot brought an iMovie from Gail Glore of an entertaining motivational talk by Guy Kawasaki. It was another great meeting. Rick Flynn could not be at the meeting. He moved to South Carolina for employment, but he is still a member of NVMUG.
1. How To Learn Photoshop
Warren Walker, Barry Hayes, and Michele Moore presented this program.
Barry and Warren during the presentation.
Adobe Photoshop is the program used by most professionals when they need to create, enhance, or edit photographs and other images whether on Windows or Macintosh computers. Photoshop is immense, complex and made for people who are going to use it full time. It has a steep learning curve.
Stephen Farber wanted to be sure that I put this into the report. There are many less expensive graphics programs, like GraphicConverter or Adobe's Photoshop L.E., that can do the more common things that Photoshop is used for. Why buy Photoshop and spend all that time learning its complexities, when simpler inexpensive programs might do?
(iPhoto, a Mac OS X only program, can rotate a picture 90 degrees, can crop the image to standard or custom sizes, can take red eye out of a sort, and can change a color picture to black and white. PixelNhance is a freeware plug-in that works with iPhoto to edit colors, contrast, and brightness levels. It greatly enhances iPhoto. It is available at:
http:www.caffieneSoft.com
Warren Walker suggests that you make a list of what you are ever going to want to do with imaging. If you never reach a point where you cannot do without Photoshop, then buy and learn it.
Warren said that a lot of how to learn Photoshop depends upon what you want to do with it. You have to take Photoshop in context, one thing at a time, otherwise it is too much.
Warren started with one book, Inside Photoshop 5,
and worked through the tutorials one chapter at a time. Inside Photoshop 5
came with a CD with all of the images referenced in the book.
He told the group that Photoshop's Help Menu will tell you how to do almost anything, but will not tell you why or when you would want to do it, or even what Photoshop can do if you do not know how to look for it. He showed that Photoshop has there are prerecorded series of steps, macros (called actions in Photoshop), available online to do things in Photoshop. By clicking on an icon next to an actions window (it did not appear intuitive), you can see the effects step by step as a way to learn.
Warren now has several books. There are a number of books that provide Photoshop tutorials. Photoshop Visual Quick Start Guide
is not a way to learn Photoshop. It does show you where to find a particular tool and how to use it, so it is a good reference. Photoshop Power Shortcuts
Warren started playing a CD with Photoshop instructions. The ones he has found most valuable start with you have taken a picture. VTC online, the VTCO web site, charges $80 to $100 per CD, and each CD is complete of itself. Mac Academy has multi-CD sets at about $50 per CD, so a ten CD set might cost $500. (Warren had a VTC demo. He has never seen the MacAcademy products, and cannot judge their relative merits.)
There are also a number of web sites with online tutorials. Usually they consist of three or four pages on a simple topic. The Adobe web site may give the maximum coverage.
Warren now has several books, a Compact Disk based tutorial, and has explored online tutorials at a number of web sites, and he used them to learn Photoshop on his own.
To show what you can do with Photoshop, Warren showed before and after pictures of a wildflower. Started with a good photograph. He spent an hour and a half with photoshop separating the flower from the background so that he could improve the image. He made a moderate color correction, and changed the degree of color saturation and blur in the background to add more depth to the picture. The result looked like a better photograph.
Photoshop Texturesis an example of a book that shows how to do a single thing. Warren used what he learned in it to create the appearance of a matte frame around a picture using Photoshop. Matte texture made the frame look like a matte, and he added a bevel embossed appearance using different shades of gray. He also used dodge and burn tools to make some areas darker and lighter, and a noise filter to make it look more like cut cardboard.
You could use Photoshop to make art from a blank page if you wanted to.
Barry Hayes is a professional photographer. He belongs to the Professional Photographer's Association of New England and has attended several of their week long seminars with professional experts on Photoshop. At these seminars you bring your own equipment and proceed from image capture to the final output. Other than that, Barry says he is self taught and has about 40 books on Photoshop. To really learn Photoshop, you have to work with it and experiment. Barry now teaches Photoshop to other professional photographers and gives seminars for the Professional Photographers of America. If anyone needs help they should feel free to contact him.
Barry demonstrated a montage of photographs, with each photograph on a separate Photoshop layer. He switched individual pictures from color to black and white and back again to better concentrate on them. There are three different ways to take the color out. Each picture had a different cut-out shape, but when you looked at the picture on its own layer, the whole photograph was still there.
Michele Moore took a course in Photoshop in college, but said it wasn't that good. She says she is now trying to fill in the blanks. One thing about Photoshop, You need a lot of RAM.
Warren said that, outside of Photoshop, you have to learn to use resolution, size and bit depth, and the differences in output for an inkjet printer, a professional commercial printer, or a monitor's display. You can manage these things in Photoshop once you understand them. Todd said that the first thing that bothered him was inches vs pixels. After he got past that it was OK. Michele used The Color Mac,
a book Warren had for several years, to study these concepts.
Warren enlarged a picture to show that each pixel is a different color. The shading you see is an optical illusion.
Never convert from RGB when you send an image to an inkjet printer. The inkjet printer is designed to expect RGB images. Sending images to a commercial printer is different.
Barry said that color management was the most important. There was quite a bit of discussion about color management, and the importance of even the lighting in the room you are in. Barry uses expensive equipment and software, and may calibrate his monitor every week.
Steven Farber wanted to say something about all of Apple's recent work in ColorSync. You determine the color profile for your camera, scanner, monitor, and printer, and set these profiles into ColorSync to match them. He said it is probably 98% accurate, which should take care of 90% of the color management problem.
The Macintosh had 80% of the graphics market. Photoshop was created on a Mac. Now since the programs are practically the same, things are evening out, but there are still more plug-ins for the Macintosh. Someone said there was a study that showed that Mac users paid off their equipment in a year, while it took PC users three years.
Barry said that most of the programs processors use, even Kodak, are PC based. He complained that he uses an expensive professional camera to take the pictures, and they process it like it was taken with a snap-shot camera.
Bean counters use PCs, awesome graphic artists are Mac personalities.
Warren said that the Mac is now making inroads in the science community that has been Unix based. One report was of a person who was using a Mac, a PC, and a Unix terminal until he changed one line of Unix code to run everything on Mac OS X.
2. Guy Kawasaki, Starting a Revolution
Midge Lubot, NVMUG President, opened the meeting with iMovie from Gail Glore of a motivational talk by a famous Macintosh evangelist, Guy Kawasaki. To be an evangelist, you have to believe in Apple Computer. Guy has written a book for small business about how to start a revolution.
One disadvantage of having an older person taking notes, is that I do not hear quite as well as some of you younger folks, so I can't be sure of the accuracy of some of the following notes.
Guy Kawasaki said some people thought he had gone over to the dark side when he was seen using an IBM portable while giving a talk at IBM. Guy said he was getting paid tens of thousands of dollars, and for that he would use anything. The he talked about his guidelines for starting a revolution.
- Create a cause. Apple's cause is to make the world a better place, by making it more creative and more productive.
- Look for virgins, not atheists. Look for people who have not been screwed before, not people who deny the Mac belief. It is hard to switch someone's religion, so forget those who believe in DOS.
- Mobilize a position. Make a person more creative and more productive, not some global thing.
- Let people test drive this cause. Give them actual experience; get them to touch it.
- Offer safe first steps. Don't ask them to change the whole company, just use it on a newsletter.
- Give them applications people need. Pagemaker, was a gift from God to Apple.
- Fix their who's buying. (Missed hearing this one).
- I think this was something about it doesn't matter if you went to Harvard. That's a negative thing. Value the creative people and subtract value for each MBA.
- Make people a part of the team, a democratic revolution, not an inner sanctum.
- Appeal to the person who is most likely to adopt a Macintosh; remember your friends.
3. This and That
After the iMovie, Midge asked if there were questions. Stephen Farber had a question, Has anyone seen a dialog about looking for a rule book server?
It happens when he is on the Internet, but then it goes on OK. That stumped everyone.
Todd Wellington said the our suggestion to submit our meeting report to the Caledonian was a good idea. They have a 97% saturation rate in this region, and there have got to be more then ten Macintosh users out there. (Actually we have over 40 on our distribution list for the news, but our meetings usually attract ten or twelve people at a time.)
Todd went down to the Apple store near Salem, Mass., to buy an Airport Station so that he could take it back if he had problems. He said it was the easiest thing to set up and worked perfectly. His wife uses Todd's original iMac, and they use the Airport Station to network to Todd's new iBook. The technology really is stunning when you look at it.
Someone else offered that usually, Technology is the word for things that don't work yet.
Todd also said that he has a cable modem. After he got it, somebody blew away the fiber optic box. Four days without the cable modem and he was climbing the walls. Don't try a cable modem thinking you can then return to a 56K dial up modem.
4. I'm Having Fun
Mac OS X: The Missing Manual
by David Pogue is no longer missing. I am enjoying discovering new information about Mac OS X in it, and writing a review which will be a NVMUG eNews special within the next few weeks.
I did not get the Macintosh Developer CD when I bought my iBook, so I shelled out $20 to Apple for it. You can download it free, but on my 56K modem it said the download would take over 14 hours. I do not really have a use for the CD. I am not planning on writing Macintosh programs. But it is great owning a CD that has all that you need to write Macintosh programs, and it will be fun learning a little more about it - assuming I have the time.
It would also be interesting to learn a bit about running Unix programs on the Mac, like Gimp. So far all I know is that some Linux people are switching to the Mac, and you do not need Linux.
The more I used Mac OS X the more I like it.
