Dorchester — Jun 24th 2008

Steve opened the June meeting at the Colliton Club, at which this month's speakers were Ivan and Martin.

Ivan demonstrated how iPhoto can be used to achieve all sorts of transformations to photos, from changes in colour balance, to alterations in texture. Some of these effects one had imagined could only be achieved using a programme such as Photoshop. He followed this up with an impressive DVD presentation which showed 'before' and 'after' for a wide range of different types of photographic manipulations. Clearly, for many of the audience, digital photography will never be the same again.

Martin then demonstrated a freeware programme, Xaos, http://xaos.sourceforge.net which enables fractals such as the Mandlebrot Set, and the Koch Snowflake to be rapidly drawn on a Mac, and then explored by smoothly and rapidly zooming in to a high magnification. Those with experience of attempting this using older Macs and programmes were most impressed with the speed of the programme, and the clarity of the images displayed.

Finally, after the bar had been patronised, Martin told us of his book printing experiences, using Pages. The typescript and page formatting could be achieved quite satisfactorily using Pages, which was much less expensive, and easier to use than the alternatives (e.g. Microsoft Word). Martin then used an on line publisher*, Lulu.com, which is based in the USA, to actually print the book, and, eventually, achieved a very satisfactory and affordable result in the form of about 30 copies of a hard back A5 book of about 100 pages. This achievement was beset by a number of problems, however, and lessons learned included: the use of TIFF images, and the preparation of a Postscript file for printing. Apparently, Apple PDF files can cause problems. Martin was encouraged by the willingness of Lulu to persevere through the difficulties to achieve the finished product.

The formal meeting closed after a short Q&A session, and we now look forward to our next Dorchester meeting, which is on September 30th.

* There was some discussion as to whether Lulu.com is, essentially a printer rather than a publisher. However, a quick look at their web site appears to suggest otherwise (although Martin did not avail himself of their publishing services).

SR

Comments

Page 1
Page 1