Dorchester — Dec 8th 2015

David Parnell gave a fascinating talk and demonstration on how he edits photographs using Adobe Lightroom and whilst it showed Lightroom to be an excellent product, it was as much the techniques he used, also available using other software, that he wished to get across. To be totally authentic he started by taking a photo David M with a Father Christmas hat and then adjusted the appearance both overall and using filters and masks applied to specific areas. David explained the difference between Camera Raw (the unmodified image as recorded by the camera sensor and the JPEGs used by most of us. The process within a camera to create a JPEG is more than just compression but also “colours” the photo (rather as Kodachrome became a camera film of choice because of the particular look it produced). Camera Raw tends to look rather flat and David soon brought the photo of David M to life. He showed several “photoshop” type adjustments to remove unwanted blemishes using both a healing brush and gave David M a more “rugged” appearance by emphasising wrinkles and shadows. He offered more examples using photos he already had on file, the most spectacular adjustment being to an Essex barge which started by being a dull grey bow in a rather dreary setting which was soon revealed in full detail with lovely natural background under a blue sky; very impressive. Lightroom includes an excellent file management system which copes easily with David’s library of well over 6,000 photographs.

Before the meeting Euan had shown several members how you can stitch photos together using Affinity Photo 1.4. They were so impressed they suggested showing members during the meeting. The resulting panorama from three photos was free of the frequently-seen colour variations in the overlaps, and the “Impainting” feature filled in the edge areas very successfully making heavy cropping unnecessary. Euan had struggled with an earlier set of photos because having a rather featureless wheat field foreground they lacked features which the software could identify to calculate the stitching. Affinity Forum support had helped in understanding this.

After the break Andy gave us two tests using Pages, the first to reveal some hidden messages and the other to correct text full of spelling and formatting errors in the shortest possible time. Several members had tried the tests in advance of the meeting but no-one had found all the hidden messages. Some had managed the title and subtitle as revealed by Andy with input from the floor. Andy then allowed four minutes for members to try the text correction test: Three Blind Mice. No one completed it 100% in the time allowed! Andy then led a step by step correction with input from the floor but suggesting quicker solutions. This was a challenging test which used some simple keystrokes but also showed how essential it is to carefully analyse the problem first.

Staying with Pages and answering a question from Drew, David M showed how to make a watermark to appear on every page in a document.

David’s further effort to show how to create a signature, and sign and return a document in IOS failed to work until the meeting broke up! So we have at least one topic for next month!

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