NVMUG eNews 9/18/2004
Last updated 9/23/2004
Digital Photography and Questions and Answers
This was a show and tell and question and answer meeting which primarily focused on digital photography.
1. Macintosh Users Brush Up On Digital Photography - Caledonian-Record
Warren Walker shows his large wildflower prints to Leigh Hurley, standing, and Phyllis Joy Hammond at the NVMUG meeting in St. Johnsbury, Saturday.
Macintosh Users Brush Up On Digital Photography
As reported by Hartley Jim
Jackson in the Caledonian-Record.
Warren Walker demonstrated his newest photographic art, and members received answers to their questions at the Northern Vermont Macintosh Users Group meeting in St. Johnsbury Saturday
Warren Walker has been working in digital photography for four years. He started by collecting pictures of native Vermont wildflowers which he sold as prints and as calendars. This year he added pictures of mushrooms. Walker showed his new large close up photographs of wild flowers in black and white except for the highlight of the picture which is in color.
Chip Troiano asked how to change the size of a print. He was was using Photoshop and trying to print an 8 x 10 inch picture, but the image was only about 5 x 7 inches. It was decided that he needed to change the size of the image, not just the print size.
This led to a discussion of resolution which is a subjective concept, but is used to refer to the number of pixels per inch. One thousand pixels per inch means that each inch contains 1,000 pixels across, and 1,000 pixels down, a total of one million pixels in a one inch square.
If you have an image that is 4 inches wide at 300 pixels per inch, and you print it at 150 pixels per inch, the print will be 8 inches wide.
In Photoshop, including Photoshop Elements, you control the resolution and size using Image Size under the Image menu. Photoshop shows the dimensions of the image in pixels, the width and height of the image in inches, and the number of pixels per inch. The default setting constrains the image, so that if you change the width, the height changes proportionally. You normally want this to avoid distortion.
The other default is not to resample, so that if you change the width both the height and the number of pixels per inch changes. If you start with 300 pixels per inch and want to make the image smaller, you may want to check the box to enable resampling rather than have the size reduction increase the pixels per inch. Photoshop will just throw away some pixels and it will look fine.
if you want to make a larger picture, it is usually best not to enable resampling because enabling resampling forces Photoshop add pixels that were not there.
There is an old saying that one should print at 300 pixels per inch which would print 300 dots per inch. But, it is no always necessary or desirable to print at 300 dots per inch. It depends upon many things including the subject, the kind of paper used, and the viewing distance. Warren prints his large color pictures at 240 dpi and his largest color prints at 180 dpi, and they look great. A computer monitor normally displays closer to 100 dpi. Often, you can enlarge your prints by printing fewer pixels per inch with good results.
If you have to enable resampling to print larger prints with enough dots per inch, it is best to do it in several steps. Enlarging it by about ten percent each time. That way Photoshop does not have to make up as many pixels at a time, and the results are more acceptable.
When you send an e-mail with an attached image, you can see how long it took to download by sending a blind copy to yourself if you and the person you are e-mailing to have the same modem.
A variety of things came up during the remaining question and answer session.
Did you know that there is a web site you can visit for news in the Klingon language?
Midge Lubot received 35,000 pieces of e-mail during ten days when they were gone after getting their own domain for a business e-mail link.
Almost all of it was spam, There is no way for them to know what important e-mail may have been lost because it was not feasible to go through all of the spam to get to it.
2. Other Meeting News
The meeting went well. There were only a couple of times when there were two groups eagerly engaged in different discussions at the same time, which made it difficult for me to follow.
When e-mailing a message that you have scanned in Photoshop, the first step should be to reduce the size of the file to shorten the downloading time. Reducing the image size and the number of pixels per inch will reduce the length of time it takes to transmit,
Another way to reduce the file size of the image is to convert it to a JPEG or GIF format, and adjust the quality of the image to make the file size and download time as small as possible while maintaining a picture that is good enough. Using File > Save for Web to make these adjustments and preview the results. Then cut and paste or drag the image into your e-mail.
Warren said it is good to resize an image in round numbers. The question is whether those should be octal or decimal numbers. At any rate, avoid fractions of pixel.
Warren and one of his large prints in black and white with a colored highlight.
I learned that, if I am willing to settle for slightly less sound quality, I could put all of our CDs on an iPod, and play our music programs through our amplifier or radio using its auxiliary input jack with the right cable to attach them. Or, I could play them directly through any FM receiver using an FM transmitter attachment.
Phyllis will be opening a second gallery with 34 Northern Vermont artists on Highway 5 about halfway between Newport and Derby in a small mall on the right side near the Century 21 sign. The grand opening will be Friday September 24 from 5 to 8 p.m.
One of the reasons Apple switched from titanium to aluminum PowerBooks is that titanium blocks Airport signals worse than aluminum. I believe it was Chip who said that when he was in California, he was able to connect to the Internet through some neighbor's wireless system. If you are going to use a wireless system outside of your own house, turn off file sharing to be safer.
DSL and Cable should be about the same speed, if you are not too far from the DSL source. DSL right across the street is incredible. Directway satellite service download speed is very fast once it is going. Upload is at about one tenth the upload speed, but at least you do not need a phone line for it as you do in some systems. There can be weather problems with Directway with real heavy clouds.
Two people attended the meeting for the first time, Jane Woodhouse and Norm Johnson.
Norm found that converting to Mac OS X eliminated almost all the problems he had been having using e-mail with Lyndon State College's system. Things are getting closer and closer together.
Midge has had problems using Safari communicating with UPS including getting very small labels. Jane said she was not having those problems. We do not know what made the difference.
Warren has had only one kernel panic working with Mac OS X, and all it required was a reboot. None of the others has had the system go down, but it is possible for a program to lock up and not be able to quit out of the program, Again all it requires is a reboot - and it has never cause me to lose any data.
It is amazing how well meetings work even when there is no special program. Many of us share the same questions.
We would like to have a special remote program featuring Scott Pelok in Michigan. Scott is a Distinguished Apple Educator and a former leader and chief guru of NVMUG. It might be real interesting hearing what he can tell us about Tiger, or almost anything else that he would like to present.
Other topics people said they were interested in are digital photography, Photoshop, music, and GarageBand. Warren said that Photoshop is such a broad area that it is difficult to know what to present. If you know the kinds of questions or areas of Photoshop you are interested in, please send me an e-mail so I can let Warren know.
2. Other News and Offers
Adobe GoLive Tutorials
For those groups using Adobe GoLive, I thought you might like to know that
Mac Design and I now publish my GoLive tutorials on their web site instead of
in the magazine. That means they are available to all of you around the
world, free of charge, without a subscription to the magazine. And instead
of me doing one once every issue, there is one every month. It goes up
mid-month. As of now, there are 3 there. Some are basic, while others will
be advanced. Perhaps they'll be of help to you.
You'll find them all at:
Macintosh Puzzle
Midge sent me this:
Want something clever for your group's newsletter? Each month AUSOM presenter Nicholas Pyers invents another Apple-themed puzzle that you can use. They are free for use as long as you follow the guidelines at the bottom of the page.
Visit his archives.
http://www.nicholaspyers.com/puzzles/
I am not including the puzzle in the eNewsletter because I do not know how many people would want the added download time, and I am not sure if I want to do the added work to get the puzzle, and paste it , and send them the information they want. However, if enough of you visit the web site and would like the puzzle, or if there is any interest and someone is willing to do the work, I will happily send the puzzle to the membership list. Just let me know.
Take Control of Buying a Mac
TidBITS has released a new ebook for Mac users: Take Control of Buying a Mac
Save money, avoid stress, and buy exactly the right Macintosh with this must-read guide from Mac guru Adam Engst!
What Mac should I buy? When will Apple release new Macs? Where should I buy my Mac? Adam has answered these questions countless times over his 17-year Macintosh career, and now he has distilled the answers into this 72-page ebook. You'll learn how to predict when Apple will release new models based on Adam's painstakingly compiled history of Macintosh releases and when in a model update cycle you can get the most bang for your buck. Rate yourself for whether you should buy a desktop or laptop Mac, and once you've made that decision, use Adam's detailed comparisons to pick which model is right for you. All the optional add-ons can be confusing, so turn to Adam's description of each to discover which you need, which are unnecessary, and where you can cut corners. When it comes time to make the purchase, Adam helps you compare the five types of Macintosh vendors, and he tips you off to three little-known ways to buy a Mac below retail cost! Special Bonus: Learn five ways to give your old Mac a new purpose and evaluate four strategies for offsetting the cost of your new Mac with your old one.
If you haven't yet purchased a Take Control ebook, remember that you can get a 10-percent discount with the user group coupon code.
Bill Amos On Close-Up Photography
Bill Amos asked:
Would there be interest in an illustrated article (for the eNewsletter) on close-up and other special techniques with a digicam?Ê Almost any model and make can be adapted with available (homemade as well as third-party commercial) gadgetry to take extraordinary photos of small and otherwise unseen subjects.
ÊI responded that we have had a lot of requests for him to do another presentation to the group, and that I would be happy to put such an article on our web page and/or a presentation for the group. We are not including pictures in our eNewsletter because of the download times involved for those of us using modems.
If you would like to see such an article, respond to this newsletter and I will let Bill know.
I Am Now a Photoshop CS Owner
Adobe sent me an offer to upgrade from Photoshop Elements 2 to Photoshop CS for (a little) less than half price. I could not resist. I do not expect to become good enough to justify owning Photoshop CS, but now it seems like there is no limit to what I can learn - other than time.
I borrowed a book from the NVMUG library to study, and am having a great time.
I had my own web page at
http://www.sover.net/~hartleyj
We sold our house ourselves, and I put up a gallery of pictures that was easy to make using Photoshop CS. The only tricky part was linking the gallery to my own home page, but I found that you can insert plain standard HTML statements among fancier code and it worked just fine.
