Bournemouth — Jan 18th 2011

Sorry about the date shown above - the only other date on offer was for the September meeting! That was because I had forgotten that it was down to me to add the 2011 meeting dates to the WAMUG calendar. This is now done! (ARMeD*) Anyway, the meeting actually took place last night, January 18th, with the programme originally set up for that December meeting but postponed because of the bad weather. (My car was stuck outside the house for a week!)

The Q & A session was satisfyingly brief - Macs must be getting better, or else our members are handling everything that comes their way!

The first demo was by Solutions and put iPhoto 11 through its' paces. It is a very competent program for basic editing and has excellent catloguing facilities too. Especially impressive was Faces - for those of us not familiar with this option, the program has an uncanny ability to recognise the face of anybody who has once been named by the Mac owner, and will label subsequent photos with a good degrtee of accuracy. Another built-in option was the ability to geo-tag, given a camera with this option also included, so that photos are shown on Google Maps at the point at which they were taken. There was a good range of tools for adjusting exposure, colour balance, and to a lesser degree, sharpness. All in all a very satisfactory purchase for an amateur photographer. One warning though - it seems that it isn't possible to view the photo files in their folder as this is secreted away by iPhoto.

John Cadd followed on with a demonstration of Lightroom, which is really for the professional photographer. The range and scope of tools for adjusting the image is impressive, to say the least, and the cataloguing is also very capable - and the files are visible. Given that John, a professional photographer specialising in photographing older sailing ships of all sizes and in locations all around the world (what a terrible job!), has a library of 150,000 (yes one hundred and fifty thousand!) images, it would certainly need to be. John showed the capabilities of Lightroom, and ran a slide-show, put together in minutes, at his first attempt at this, and complete with music and captions, to demonstrate both one of the capabilities of Lightroom, and his superb photographs. He pointed out two important facts about the program. It is not meant to be a replacemenet for Photoshop, as it will only make changes to a whole image and not to parts of it (like iPhot), and it is really designed as a workflow tool for the professional, taking photos from the camera, working on them and then outputting them in any desired format for print, the web or for a book or slide show.

There was no time to test the knowledge of the Bournemouth Group and see if anyone could do better than get the 5 out of 26 answers with which Euan won the prize when the quiz was run at Dorchester. But next time...

*ARMeD? Age Related Memory Deficiency...

Comments

Page 1

Roy Rainford said…

The two presentations made this an interesting meeting. Thanks to both speakers and to Michael for the arrangements and for not running the quiz!

Mark Ford said…

Sorry I missed the meeting - I was particularly looking forward to John's work with Lightroom and seeing some more of his photographs.
I will post my reservation about iPhoto on the discussion board - perhaps Solutions have a better work round than I found on the web.
If Euan can only get 5 right what hope is there for the rest of us?
Page 1