OUR MAY MEETING

Our topic for the May 19th meeting of the digital photography SIG
will be Taking Pictures for the Web: How to Photograph Objects for
Ebay or Other Auction Sites. Photographer Mark Smith will show us
how to get professional looking results using a digital camera and
backgrounds commonly available in your home.

Mark's background combines photographic and information technology
skills with business acumen developed over years of experience in a
variety of different businesses. His photographic body of work is
widely varied, but with emphasis on urban landscapes, street
photography and portraits. Commercial photography includes work
related to Internet and Website development by Creationsite
Multimedia Services, in which he is a partner

In 2003 Mark co-founded LINGG Productions, a Cleveland based arts
promotion and event production company, in which he is still
actively involved. Mark is a board member of the Cleveland Film
Society and Cleveland International Film Festival, and co-chairs the
Marketing Committee for that organization.

The meeting will start at 6:30 p.m. at the Maple Heights Regional
Library. Please visit www.digitalphotosig.org for directions and a
map.


DIGITAL PHOTOGRAPHY COURSE

I picked up information on a digital photography course while
visiting Micro Center's new digital photography section at their
Mayfield Heights store. Kenston Community Education in Chagrin Falls
is offering the course described below.

Introduction to Image Editing
Instructor: Gary Newyear
Cost: $44
"We'll cover the basics of the Photoshop program and jump into
cloning, composing, "portrait" retouching and much more. While we'll
be using Adobe Photo Shop what you will learn in this class will
apply to most image editing programs. Learn about "layers", "paths"
and levels. Take this class and really discover the magic in
Photoshop. Be sure to bring your favorite photographs on a floppy or
cd-rom. Please contact the instructor at (440) 247-4647, if you have
any questions."
register online:
http://www.maxsolutionsonline.com/KENSTONCOMMUNITYED/mw_actdetails.as
p?S=7298&PubID=4324&P=4049&act_id=7106


NEW VERSION OF PHOTOSHOP

The following review appeared in the NY Times:

May 5, 2005
A New Photoshop Makes Retouching Reality (Somewhat) Easier
By DAVID POGUE

WHOEVER said "the camera never lies" was either a prankster, a
simpleton or somebody who had never heard of Photoshop.

Adobe Photoshop, of course, is the world's most popular photo-
editing software (for Mac and Windows). Every time a magazine pastes
a movie star's head onto a different body for its cover, you can bet
that Photoshop was involved. Such digital manipulation is so common
that "Photoshop" has become a verb: "My ex-husband was on that trip,
too, but I've Photoshopped him out of this shot."

But even when no movie stars are decapitated, Photoshop's magic is
at work all around you. Photoshop color-corrects, brightens,
darkens, crops, sharpens or airbrushes imperfections from a huge
percentage of the photographs you see every day, whether in ads,
articles, movies or CD's, on Web sites or the covers of books.

No wonder, then, that when Adobe releases a new version, as it did
last week, photographers and designers sit up and take notice.

Still, Photoshop is now 15 years old, and Photoshop CS2, as it's
called, is the 11th version. What features could possibly be added
that would not make Photoshop even more vast and complex than it
already is? (To give you some feeling of that vastness and
complexity, there are at least 95 Photoshop how-to books, 3
Photoshop magazines and 4 annual Photoshop conferences. No wonder,
because you don't get a printed manual with the software.)

Some of the additions in CS2 are administrative tools rather than
creative ones. One, in particular, is aimed at alleviating the sense
of despair you may feel upon first encountering Photoshop's
staggering array of 494 menu commands. It's the Edit Menus dialogue
box, where you can hide commands you never use and highlight (in
color) commands you use most often. You can even switch among sets
of edited menus on the fly.

Photoshop also comes with Bridge, an all-new graphics-browsing
program that bears an uncanny resemblance to, say, iPhoto from
Apple. It looks like a slide sorter, displaying thumbnail versions
of all the graphics files on your hard drive. You can rotate or crop
them, give them star ratings or text labels, delete the duds,
conduct slide shows and so on.

More important to professional photographers, Bridge also applies
certain transformations to batches of photos all at once, without
interrupting work in Photoshop: conversions from one file format to
another, for example, or standard color adjustments. For those who
process gigabytes of photo files a day (especially RAW files, the
very big but extremely adjustable photo files preferred by advanced
shooters), this background-processing feature can save a lot of time.

Bridge also connects directly to Adobe's online stock-photo service,
which lets designers browse, buy and directly open professional,
royalty-free photos from services like Comstock and Getty Images.
(Note to designers who do not work for global media conglomerates:
don't get all excited. The photos cost $200 to $400 each.)

Most Photoshop fans will be grateful for the way the Font menu now
depicts a sample of each typeface - and not so grateful for the
Windows-style copy-protection system that Adobe has introduced in
this version. Upon installation, your copy of Photoshop phones home
over the Internet, to prevent you from installing it on more than
two computers.

Of the artistic features, Adobe has doled out its goodies
evenhandedly to its various constituencies. For everyday
shutterbugs, a new tool quickly removes red-eye, the byproduct of
flash photography that makes adorable children look like crimson-
pupiled spawn of the Devil. The Spot Healing brush is another
quicker fixer-upper; you can use it to delete an unwanted element of
a photo - from a single freckle to a bystander's entire body - with
just a few clicks. When this feature is on good behavior, Photoshop
undetectably clones bits of the background to paint out the
offending element. (Photoshop inherited the Spot Healing brush from
its inexpensive sibling, Photoshop Elements.)

For more serious photographers, new special-effect filters can
correct common kinds of lens distortion, like barrel distortion and
pincushioning, in which the photo seems swollen or puckered toward
the center.

For graphic designers, Adobe comes bearing two gifts. One is a wild
new Warp mode, which can distort a photo as if it were on a sheet of
stretchy, curly latex. When you want to wrap a custom label around a
soda can, or make a plasma TV ripple in the breeze like a flag, the
Warp feature is just the ticket.

The new Smart Objects, unhelpfully named though they may be, are
even more flexible. Ordinarily, anything you paint or paste into a
Photoshop document becomes what is called a bitmap: a memorized
array of colored dots, frozen until you paste or paint over them.

But once you designate an area of your artwork as a Smart Object,
the rules change. You can shrink that scrap of image at will,
without worrying that you won't be able to scale it back up if you
change your mind. (By contrast, ordinary bitmaps - Dumb Objects? -
lose so much resolution when re-enlarged that they look jagged and
horrible.) If you duplicate a Smart Object, furthermore, the copies
are all linked to the original. Change one fire hydrant's color, and
you change them all.

By far the coolest new feature in Photoshop CS2, though, is called
Vanishing Point. It's also the most difficult to describe; in the
attempts you find on the Web, you can practically see the knuckle
marks on the writers' foreheads. But here goes.

Suppose you're trying to edit a picture that includes flat surfaces
in perspective: receding gymnasium floorboards, say, or city
buildings, or a moving van photographed from the back left corner.
In each case, trying to paste or paint something into the shot is
fiendishly difficult, because you have to maintain the same V-shaped
shrinking away to the vanishing point.

But if you click four corners with the Vanishing Point tool,
Photoshop learns exactly how that surface recedes. Anything you
paste or paint into that area shapes itself into perfect
perspective. Copy a window from one side of the building, and
Photoshop snaps it into the size and shape appropriate for the
adjacent side. Suddenly it's easy to paint a new company logo onto
that moving van or seamlessly repair a ripped-up section of those
floorboards (by copying from an intact area).

This new feature has been accused of being demo-ware, suitable
primarily for dazzling demonstrations at trade-show booths. But even
if you need this tool only occasionally, when the day arrives, it
can make almost impossible editing jobs practically effortless.

The price for all of this power, online, is $150 for an upgrade, or
$550 for the full version. A spreadsheet's worth of other prices are
available, depending on how many of the Adobe Creative Suite
programs - Illustrator, InDesign, GoLive, Acrobat, Photoshop - you
already own, and how many you want to upgrade.

Now if you're not a hard-core pixel pusher, weigh Photoshop's magic
carefully against its complexity. Remember that the somewhat simpler
Photoshop Elements ($100) offers 80 percent of Photoshop's power for
about one-sixth the price. In fact, if all you want to do is
organize, share, search and sort your photos, easy-to-use programs
like Picasa 2 for Windows (free) and iPhoto 5 for Macintosh ($80
with four other programs in the iLife suite) make even more sense.
These programs rotate, crop and color-correct your photos, although
they stop short of Photoshop tricks like removing a telephone pole
sticking out of someone's head.

If you use Photoshop on the job, though, or if you use it more than
a couple of times a week, get the upgrade. These bigger tweaks,
along with a lot of smaller ones, make CS2 a worthy investment.
Thanks to Dr. Adobe's careful nips and tucks, Photoshop CS2 stands
ready to make the camera lie in all sorts of ingenious new ways.

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This email is a communication from the Digital Photography Special
Interest Group, a program of the Greater Cleveland PC User's Group.
For more information, please visit: www.digitalphotosig.org