Amersham Beyond Group - 5th March 2020

Meeting Notes on Creative Photography and Photo-Art
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spb
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Joined: Tue Mar 25, 2008 7:04 pm

Amersham Beyond Group - 5th March 2020

Post by spb » Fri Mar 06, 2020 9:26 pm

MONTHLY CHALLENGES

All Amersham Beyond Group Challenge images can be seen at Amersham Beyond Group on Flickr.

#9 PHOTO PAINTING
This has been a very popular challenge. Nearly all submissions have resulted from applying the chosen photo painting app to the entire image. As part of any future experimentation I would encourage members to try limiting the painted effect to just part of the image, eg the background. This can be achieved by means of a layer mask. This can be more subtle, and an added benefit is that such images are more likely to find favour with competition judges who invariably mark down visibly processed images in favour of what appear to be straight photographs - even if they are actually heavily manipulated!

#10 SILHOUETTE
For post-processing an image to create a rapid silhouette, the Photoshop Threshold adjustment continued to be popular and highly effective. In the event that a single value of threshold does not reveal the required detail in all areas, multiple Threshold Adjustment Layers, can be blended or masked for best effect.

#11 TEXT
Deliberately intended to be more challenging, the text had to be created by the author themselves. Many members stepped-up with excellent and imaginative images. The manipulation and distortion of text possible with Photoshop, Photoshop Elements and Affinity Photo proved to be impressive but the sheer number of fonts available was daunting and demonstrated why typography is a professional specialisation in its own right. Spelling out the message with cake decorations or herbs was much easier!

Speech bubbles were employed in more than one image. For those who have not found them in Photoshop CC, they are ludicrously hidden deep within the Custom Shape Tool>Settings>legacy Shapes and More>All Legacy Default Shapes>Talk Bubbles or in Photoshop Elements Custom Shape Tool>Shapes>Talk Bubbles. A member asked if they could be just an outline only. This can be achieved by selecting the bubble (Ctrl+Click on the thumbnail of the bubble in the layers palette) and then Edit>Stroke Selection with the required line thickness and colour. Finally delete the original bubble.

There was a brief discussion of serif, san serif and display fonts. Inappropriate fonts were illustrated as was the online fury created by anything presented in Comic Sans. There are whole websites dedicated to this subject!

The most trustworthy font is widely considered to be Baskerville and the most legible, Georgia.

The next Challenge is;
#12 PAPER
Images are requested of, or about, paper in any of its forms (except trees!). Any subject any design, any method – feel free to do whatever you like.

At the meeting we viewed quite a large number of inspirational images from the internet of white and coloured sheets of paper, origami, books, libraries, stationery, papier mache, etc. It’s a surprisingly wide field to explore.

BACK OF BEYOND - DIARIES

Colour Space. The Beyond Challenge checker software looks at several attributes of submitted images. Amongst these is colour space. It accepts images with embedded sRGB profiles and rejects any others such as Adobe RGB or ProPhoto RGB. If there is no assigned profile it accepts the image with a warning that it will be treated as sRGB.

This whole area is highly confusing. Adobe CC apps now use the massive ProPhoto space as their default and enthusiast photographers are often recommended to employ Adobe RGB because it is slightly better at greens and blues. These spaces can result in badly distorted, or at least desaturated, colour if not accommodated correctly when displayed. Unfortunately the web, our screens and our printers can only manage sRGB (at best) and my recommendation is to set cameras, Lightroom, Adobe Camera Raw and Photoshop to sRGB and forget about it. Photoshop Elements is slightly coy about this but Edit>Color Settings>Always Optimise Colors for Computer Screens equates to sRGB.

As a final check, when saving an image, File>Save As should show a ticked Save Option of ICC Profile: sRGB. This will keep the online checker happy.

Bulk Renaming. When I have to change the filename of a set of images all at the same time, my go-to image viewer Faststone Image Viewer (Win, £Free) comes to the rescue with it’s Batch Rename facility. This can handle some simple rules such as adding sequential numbers, including the original filename, adding time and date etc.

For more advanced batch renaming scenarios Advanced Renamer (Win, £Free) does the heavy lifting. This has every rule, attribute and renaming scenario that you could imagine for many different file types - not just images. It can also try out a renaming script and undo the changes if necessary. I don’t need it very often but it came to the rescue when I needed to rename 500 images for the Beyond Flickr site.

Podcasts. To keep my mind occupied whilst on a walk or a car journey, podcasts offer a virtually bottomless source of information and entertainment. Castbox is one of a number of apps to help find and organise them and currently claims to have 95 million items of audio content for smartphones and smart speakers. A podcast called 99% Invisible is a current favourite of mine and with this months challenge in mind a recent episode focussed on how Germany held onto a Gothic font called Fraktur or Blackletter long after the rest of Europe had standardised on the plain Latin alphabet. As if he didn't have enough to think about, Hitler decided that Fraktur was old fashioned and banned it in 1941.

Cheers, Steve

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