Next Meeting: 16 February 2006

The next meeting for the Graphics & Web Development SIG is 
planned for Thursday,  16 February 2006.  

We plan to look at a few new things of interest. Working with overlays and other effects to enhance a photo. New filters or plug-ins that enhance digital photos. 

Recent topics:

FotoFusion lets you make beautiful creations with our digital photos, great collages. Visit their web site and check out the gallery. After we learned how to design fantastic layouts for our albums well explore how to have them published. I'll bring in an example of an album I just had printed from an online publishing service.

 Also Desktop Macros from Xstarter solutions. This is fantastic for saving time and hand stress during repetitive keystroke & mouse combinations. I just converted nearly 4,000 images that took over 13 steps originally and reduced it to two steps with this product! If I had continued doing it by hand, it would have involved making 49,322 mouse and keystrokes, using the macro reduced the task to 7,588. It saved me weeks or months of time due my CTS problems which limit how much abuse my wrists can take. Absolutely great product!  And a new training CD is on it's way. 

Other applications: AKVIS Coloriage, Enhancer, Retoucher, Stamp, and Chameleon;  Love, love, love AKVIS! PictoColor iCorrect Portrait the newest version is now a plug-in, and Ransen Software's Repligator Pro 12. I'm a long time Repligator user and love it's frames and edge effects. Easy to use and completely customizable.

Planned for the next several meetings: More Photoshop CS and the new Photoshop CS2.  Photoshop CS  has wonderful  features and tools and we'll see some great ideas for enhancing your digital images . We have several training and informational DVD's with great tips, techniques,  features, and more. We will also look at Photoshop Elements 3 basic training over the next couple meetings.

Recently we have discussed Photoshop plug-ins and the conversion of color photos to black and white, which method is best, plug-ins that will do this, and why you would use this rather than converting to grayscale. Also discussed was favorite plug-ins and the best Photoshop books.

Additional topics: nik Sharpener Pro! Complete Edition & nik Color Efex Complete Edition. (www.nikmultimedia.com) - using these filters to improve and enhance you digital images. Also newly added  in the nik lineup is the Dfine plug-in. 

We will continue with the  digital photography topic (time permitting) using Photoshop CS and  Paint Shop Pro 8/9. We also have the Paint Shop Pro 8 Power Suite to look at. Featuring digital photo repair, restoration, and retouching. Please visit the Review section of this SIG, click the "Demo's & Tutorials" link to view the new flash tutorials that I have added. This is what we will be focusing on at the next several meetings. We have lots of new things to look at and discuss!

In addition we have E-Book Systems Flip Album Pro 5 and FlipPublisher to learn about. I've used FlipAlbum Pro for a while now and highly recommend it.

Plus - We will look at more Adobe Photoshop CS books that will increase your knowledge and understanding of Photoshop, digital images, and color correction. We also have other new plug-ins and the latest release of Paint Shop Pro, the Power Suite, should be here by then. Lots of new things to see!

 For those with questions about the plug-ins we've been covering, we can look at them again. They include AutoFX "Mystical Lighting"  and Mystical Tint, Tone and Color and color correction:  ColorWasher & iCorrect4.0.  We will be looking at these tools, and other filters/plug-ins that repair and enhance digital images. 

Past Meetings 

November's Topic: eHelp's RoboDemo. " The easy way to create animated software tutorials and demos."

October's Topic: Flip Album Professional 4 - 
Create photo Albums that can be annotated, shared with others, (with or without music), create client demo CD's that can be password protected, encrypted to protect images from being copied from the CD, even set an expiration date on the CD. Show your work without fear of losing your images! Time permitting, we'll look at last month's topics too. Albums can be set to auto flip and they can even be viewed as a slide show.

September Topic: Extensis Intellihance Pro 4.0, other Extensis plug-ins for Adobe Photoshop.  New effects & super themes from DPA Software's FrontLook series of effects and Best Of Paul 3 Super Theme package.  

Extensis Intellihance Pro review will be available in the review section in the next few days. 

July Topic: Enhancing Photos - Auto FX AutoEye 2, Photographic Edges 5.0, & other effects & tools using Adobe Photoshop Elements as the host application.

June Topic:  Features of the AutoFX DreamSuite Components - the latest in the series is the DreamSuite Series Two - which has 12 effects and  comes with 2 bonus effects if purchased by the end of June 2002. Review of the Series Two is in the Review Section. We will also continue discussing last months topics.

May 16th Meeting Topic was Auto FX DreamSuite - Gel Series.  FrontLook Series plug-ins and themes for FrontPage 2000/2002. We also touched at starting a web site in NetObjects Fusion as a comparison between the two web design applications and what applications were good for image editing.

To learn more about the Auto FX Gel Series see the Review Section of this SIG or visit www.autofx.com.  To view examples of the FrontLook Series Click  Here . Visit www.frontlook.com to learn more about DPA Software.

The Review section has graphic & web product reviews that you may find helpful when looking for applications to help you with graphics & web design. 

In the past , we have gone over creating custom banners, java applets and scripts, using PaintShop Pro 6 & 7, Micrografx Webtricity 2, and other graphics programs. Will will touch on these again as we build a web site in Fusion 5.0 and add the custom graphics and java applets and scripts.