Dorchester — Sep 9th 2014

Euan gave a very interesting talk on adjusting the quality of photos which one might otherwise simply discard. He arranged semicircular seating around the screen so we could more closely see  the adjustments as they were made. Starting with iPhoto Euan showed the effects of adjusting levels which had the most immediate effect and then showed the effects of playing with Exposure, Contrast, Saturation and the other adjustments offered by iPhoto.  

Euan emphasised ‘play’, to try moving the various adjustments to their limits to see what the effects are. Most changes will be quite subtle but might not be apparent to a newcomer. iPhoto (like other image editors) has the option to revert completely to the original and start over. Don’t be wary, have a go! N.B. ALWAYS work on a copy and retain the original. 

Euan wanted to show more sophisticated options than those offered by the current version of iPhoto. As Photoshop is expensive and OTT for most of us, he introduced us to GIMP an open source, free and very competent alternative. Although the software includes many potential adjustments, Euan concentrated on Levels and Curves which allow one to home in on a particular pixel colour in a photo and then adjust that colour while blending the changes into the whole range of colour levels. With just these two, Levels and Colour Curves, Euan showed how to recover various examples of poor quality photos with precious content, to a really acceptable quality. This was a very convincing demonstration.  

David then gave a short presentation on Smart Folders and Tags both using aliases to group files from different folders. In the case of Smart Folders having set up the criteria for documents to be included in a new document meeting those criteria are automatically added to the folder. With tags it is necessary to apply the relevant tag to any new document.

Comments

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David Moon said…

Further to discussion at meeting, it is possible to set iPhoto (9.5.1 for sure) Preferences to use GIMP to edit photos. In iPhoto Preferences, select the Advanced Tab. Where it shows Edit Photos, if GIMP not listed, double click on that selection area and the Finder Applications window will open from which you can select GIMP.
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