Dorchester — Feb 9th 2016

Euan explained that masking is laying a partially translucent or opaque layer over an image to affect the appearance of the image without affecting the original. The mask can affect only a selected part, parts, or the whole of the image, the level of transparency of the mask varying the intensity of the effect. The default red colour of a mask is based on “Rubylith” a red transparent film used in traditional lithographic printing to mask parts of an image to ‘separate’ the print colours — whether cmyk ‘process’ colours or individual ’spot’ colours. Using Affinity Photo and Affinity Designer, Euan showed how adjustment layers can adjust a part of the image by the degree of exposure or cover set by the mask. Layers can be built up one by one to add colour gradients, transparency, and so-called “bump” or “displacement” masks. Each layer can be turned on and off, and its position in the layer stack moved, and modified as required. Masks can be text or other shapes, and text shapes can be edited. In addition to basic adjustment layer masks, Euan showed several examples — masking a girl’s head with soft flying hair from its background to let it stream in a blizzard; masking a photo of a leaf-eating caterpillar in the jungle to remove the jungle foliage and reveal some title text beneath. A rough stone wall in Poundbury suddenly found itself covered in graffiti writing which was editable and movable, and in the most dramatic example with a flourish he brushed away layer after layer to reveal the time-lapse growth of some flats in Queen Mother Square, Poundbury, which were then revealed as Buckingham Palace — and finally as The Winter Palace in St Petersburg.

Mark showed us a very useful Mac App “PowerPhoto”. This is the El Capitan (only) version of FatCat Software’s previous “iPhoto Library Manager”, which Mark had shown us a couple of years ago. Mark listed six functions of the App. 1, Creating and manage multiple Photo libraries. 2) Copy Photos and their metadata. 3) Merge Photo libraries. 4) Find duplicates. 5) Browse and Search. 6) Migrate iPhoto/Aperture libraries. An excellent feature is the speedy access to photos across multiple libraries and then being able to drag photos to the desk top, without the complication of having to open each Photos library in turn. The more extensive display of metadata is a key feature for Mark who takes photos for archaeological and historical records. Providing the Camera itself can provide the input, in addition to basic GPS data, the data displayed includes the altitude, latitude, longitude and image direction reference. Good value at $30, (the previous version is still available).

Tom introduced us to PBWorks and how it was being used as a community site for ex-Marconi Apprentices and includes photo libraries, regular member information updates and news items. The Colliton Club WiFi was too slow for a hands on demonstration so Tom will expand further, relying on slides, next month.

Q&A. John Lemon has been helping a friend who has switched to Mac who was having a problem with getting emails on his bt-internet mail account. As Sheena had raised a similar problem during the break with Mick, we explained how Mick and she had fixed it. She was not receiving email on one of her two macs with no problems on her IOS devices. Mick suggested that this may well be to do with the BT changeover, running their own mail servers rather than using Yahoo. Interestingly the Icons for the mail account on the two Macs differed though all the account detail was the same. They deleted the account and re-entered it — but as “Another Mail Account” and not as a Yahoo account. This worked.

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