Thanks to the generousity of the Digital Photography SIG, we had a fabulous March meeting! My thanks go out to Tom Maresca and Bruce Smith, Digital Photography SIG leaders, and Bob Bevan, PACS SIGMeister, for facilitating the scheduling change.
I had intended to go to the April PACS gathering (even though our Photoshop SIG was not scheduled to meet) to hear Dave Marra, Apple Senior Systems Engineer, speak about Leopard and other Apple stuff. But because of various commitments and preparations I had to make for Passover, I was not able to attend. If any of you did go, maybe at our May meeting you could give us a little low-down on what was covered.
In the two hours we had at our March meeting we managed to cover everything on my list of topics.
We spent most of the time covering the topic of how to make re-usable “picture frames” for our images. In the not-to-distant past, ready-made collections of these artsy-fartsy frames were quite popular and could be purchased from software vendors. But I guess that people began realizing that they were easy to make and began making their own. As a result, the availability of commercially-available ready-made frames has dwindled. A Google search, however, using the keywords “art image borders” returned hundreds and hundreds of pages of various freeware and commercial clip-art borders of every imaginable style, including Victorian, Art Nouveau, and Art Deco. Don’t bother, though; you’ll have lots more fun making your own, and if we need to review the topic, I’d be glad to go over it again.
Discussing the making of these frames, and in particular, placing your signature on the frame, led to learning a little bit about the text tool. To my surprise (and neglect) we had never talked about the text tool before! I promise to cover it in greater depth at a future meeting because in many ways it is more powerful than what you get in your average word processor, allowing for the changing of character spacing, leading, vertical and horizontal scale, kerning, baseline shift, and lots of other good stuff.
We also talked a little bit about layer blending.I’ve had several topic requests for our next meeting including using the pen tool to make selections. I’ll tell you right now that making selections with the pen tool is extremely labor intensive and that just about any other method of making selections is a better way to go. The pen tool has one big advantage, however: It is used to make clipping paths, which we will also cover at our May meeting. Odly enough, I may use Adobe Illustrator (rather than Photoshop) to teach you how to use the pen tool; the tool works in the same identical way in both applications, and this way you’ll get a little introduction to what vector graphics applications are all about.
Since our last meeting, I’ve received several “before-and-after” images from SIG members, and I hope to get them up on our gallery page as soon as possible. In the meantime, keep those images coming!
See you all in May!
Marty