Digital Workshop 7 April 09
This Workshop was conceived as one devoted to answering questions raised by members. In particular Barry Pearson was asked to explain the workings of the WEB site, and then to explain his method of putting “Frames within Frames” Geoff Robinson was asked to expand on the subject of Blending Modes, following his earlier tutorial involving adding new skies to images. Roger Dye was asked to address the topic of installing Plugins and to expand on the way Lightroom can be used by photographers.
Barry had copied the NCPS website over to the Shuttle for demonstration purposes, since we did not have direct access in the room to the WEB. He noted that we had one of the larger Photographic web sites with about 1500 pages, and including over 800 images. The Archive went back to 1984. The Blog (News etc) was the first place to visit for updated information. When items (more than a month old) fell out of the Blog they would be found under the other headings. If all else failed the A-Z & Search button could be used.
Tony Redford noted that the Web Site was perceived as a great credit to the Club and Barry should be thanked for the efforts he put in to maintain it so.
Barry then considered the Borders within Borders system. By putting a border within the image with the main subject overlapping the inner border one could often emphasize the subject, separating it from its background more effectively. Barry went on to demonstrate the steps he used and was asked to include these steps in a new PDF script on the WEB. He included a description of how he used Rim Lighting to emphasize his subject and discussed when these techniques might be most appropriate.
Geoff recapped on the various Blending Modes available and indicated which ones he found most useful. The modes all have different names: some, like Darken, Lighten, Multiply, are fairly intuitive: others like Screen, Colour Burn etc less so, though he found them useful. The modes all represent different ways in which corresponding pixels in the two (or more) layers can be blended. Obvious ways are to take the lighter, or the darker of the two corresponding pixels and use them in the final result. More complicated is to take the average value, or to multiply the two values together to get the final result. The complication which sets in is that each pixel has three numbers representing the intensities of the Red, Green, and Blue components; so that performing the above simple combinations can change the colour as well as the intensity. Because of this the use of the various blending modes is best learnt by experiment. Geoff demonstrated the various modes using a Prague scene and a close-up of rusty metal.
Roger spoke of the use and availability of Plug-ins in general, and then considered a plug-in he had purchased, PTLens, which corrects distortions caused by Zoom, and Wideangle lenses. He demonstrated the ease with which the Adobe program Lightroom could modify images, and argued that newcomers might be better served by buying Lightroom and Photoshop Elements, rather than the more expensive later versions of Photoshop.