Past Meetings

October 21, 2009 - Hammondsport Mac Users Group

TOPIC: ADOBE PHOTOSHOP LIGHTROOM 2

ATTENDING: Tom B, Bob S, John D, Jerry L and Jack H.

Jerry L. gave an informative demo of Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 2, which is aimed at professional and advanced amateur photographers.

What it is:

--- A database-driven photo organizer and importer

--- A sophisticated and powerful photo enhancement editor

--- A powerful and flexible print engine

--- A powerful interface for generating image-based web pages

What it is not:

--- It is not Photoshop (you can't put your sister's head on another body)

After a groan of disappointment from the non-professionals in the group, Jerry showed us some of the amazing features of this software.

What it is great at:

--- Making a so-so image a really good image, a good image a great image.

--- Finding the one photo out of your 1000's of images using a straight forward folder structure, key words, ratings, etc.

--- Fearless editing. The original image is never changed. The history of all the adjustments are displayed.

--- RAW image processing. Can work in RAW, DNG, TIFF, JPEG

--- 16 bit processing for higher quality images

What it costs:

$300 ( a bit less on Amazon)

What documentation comes with it:

None. But there are several tutorials and good help available on-line. Best third party book is The Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 2 Book for Digital Photographers by Scott Kelby

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Alternatives - Tom shared some simple, free apps to enhance and display photos for us photographers who are ...well ... simple and cheap:

PixlNhance - drag and drop an image into this app, then use the split screen to view changes in contrast, color, etc.

JAlbum - quickly convert a large folder of images into an html viewer in a few seconds, ready to post on your website.

Another interesting discovery - John shared this gem: he found a vast folder of hidden images preserved in Leopard of every picture that had come into his computer - even images he had completely deleted. John's computer was sending a message that the 'scratch disc was full', probably due to the many large images he was importing. This folder of hidden images can be viewed by opening a Finder window to view 'All Images'. Many of these images were quite large (several mb). No one at our meeting was quite sure if these could or should be deleted to free up HD space. It was a surprise to all of us that this extensive collection existed. This may be a Photoshop issue according to this article.

Next Meeting - Wednesday - November 18, 2009 at 10:30am - topic: Making Music on your Mac

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