Amersham Beyond Group - 6th Dec. 2018

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 - 6th Dec. 2018

Post by spb » Sun Dec 09, 2018 1:46 pm

SERIF AFFINITY PHOTO

After a few words to introduce the new Amersham Beyond Group, APS member Chris Smith demonstrated perhaps the first really viable alternative to Photoshop; Serif Affinity Photo.

Serif are a small British software company established in 1987 who decided to create a new photo editor from the ground-up using best practice for professional editing workflow and raw file development. Launched in 2015 Affinity Photo has won over 200 awards and Serif currently have 6.5 million customers. It has since been joined by Affinity Designer and Affinity Publisher is due in 2019.

Enduring licences for PC or Mac are one-off price of £48.99. 20% discount is available for mentioning Amersham Photographic Society and larger discounts of up to 50% are occasionally available for special promotions. The licence is for life and has included all point releases to date. There will be an upgrade cost for major releases and one such is expected in 2019.

Affinity Photo supports a wide variety of file formats. It opens all common raw files and can open and save Photoshop .PSDs. Many lens & camera profiles are supported. Filters are displayed live and all are 16 bit and the workflow is non-destructive with 8,000 levels of undo. Editing features are comprehensive and compare closely to Photoshop.

Chris has been using Affinity Photo for a couple of months and enthusiastically demonstrated the basic workflow and tools. Layers are created automatically for a non-destructive workflow and free Macro Packs (like Actions in Photoshop CC) automate the application of adjustments. Others can be recorded.

Perhaps most notably, Serif have recorded over 200 short tutorial videos on every aspect of using the program and these are considered to be major reason for the success of the product.

A show of hands at the first meeting of the Amersham Beyond Group revealed perhaps 50% currently using Photoshop CC, 30% Photoshop Elements and 15% Affinity Photo. The group will support all of these products but new members or those (like me) increasingly frustrated with Adobe’s products or pricing might give Affinity Photo a try. There is a free 10 day trial period.

It’s is important to note that Affinity Photo is not a cataloguing programme and does not emulate or replace Adobe Lightroom. It also requires a fairly powerful PC.

Many thanks to Chris for his enthusiastic and impressive demo.

MONTHLY CHALLENGE

The first Challenge is to produce an image involving;

#1 BLUR AND/OR OUT-OF-FOCUS

This could be by means of post-processing or in-camera;

Post-processing could involve one of the many blur filters available in photo editors such as Gaussian Blur or Motion Blur. This might be applied to all or part of the image, it could be fully visible or at reduced opacity or it could be on a blended layer.

In-camera blur might require manual camera settings and turning off stabilisation, or at least a long exposure combined with camera or subject movement. Turning off auto-focus will probably be necessary to allow the camera to release the shutter when the subject is not sharp. Alternatively a large aperture combined with a longer lens will reduce the depth of field to render foreground and/or background out of focus (so-called bokeh). If using a camera phone it may be difficult to persuade it to take an out-of-focus picture in which case a camera app can be employed. Slow Shutter Cam is a dedicated app for iPhone which can create interesting light trails onscreen in real time. No doubt there is an Android equivalent.

Arrangements for submitting Challenge images are covered in the Amersham Beyond Group FAQ posting above.

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THE BACK OF BEYOND – DIARIES

IPHONE VS ANDROID
I mentioned a few months ago that I had purchased a cheap Android Samsung A5 (2017) smartphone to see if I might be tempted to convert from iPhones. I concluded that, with the addition of some new apps, the Samsung could replicate everything on with my iPhone. I use Photo Manager Pro on the iPhone to display a portfolio of images from Dropbox when offline. The presentation facilities that I was used to, proved to be the hardest to replicate on Android but I finally found dFolio which came close, lacking only a search by filename.

Androids have the added benefit of much lower cost and greater flexibility of screen presentation (whereas the iPhone effectively has virtually none).

However I came to the conclusion that these benefits did not outweigh family familiarity with the iPhone way of doing things. As a consequence we upgraded to iPhone Xs’s at vast expense.

GENUINE SCAM
Everyone should be alert to a scam that was experienced by an APS member on his doorstep last week;

A parcel was delivered and signed for. It was correctly addressed to him but contained a new £800 iPhone and details of a new contract with Virgin Mobile that he had not requested. Ten minutes later a courier returned and said that it had been misdelivered and he would take it back. Upon being asked for a receipt he mumbled something in a foreign language, grabbed the parcel and disappeared.

It appears that you can set up a contract with Virgin and receive a phone without any money changing hands! Although the name, address and phone number were correct, all other details (bank, mother’s maiden name etc) were not correct. Clearly Virgin do not do Due Diligence to establish the identity of a new customer or that the bank account is genuine.

He is now jumping through the hoops of persuading Virgin (repeatedly) that this is a fraud, reporting this to the police and signing up for credit-monitoring and fraud prevention agencies. It seems that the police have no resources to investigate and the fraud reporting agencies are only interested in collecting statistics.

Since the Experian hack in 2017 I have received a monthly report of changes to my credit record. Noddle provide a similar service free of charge (but subject to advertising). Individuals who consider themselves at risk of identity fraud can also register on the National Fraud Database maintained by CIFAS. This is used by providers of products and services to trigger extra checks on registrant’s identity.

THIRD PARTY INK FOR CANON PRINTERS
We know that many sources of high quality (not just ‘compatible’) third party ink for Epson printers are available such as Fotospeed, Marrutt and Permajet. However third party ink for Canon printers has not previously been available as far as we know. An APS member is of the belief that AGFA is supplied by the same manufacturer as Canon and so they may indeed have quality compatible ink for Canon printers. Can anyone confirm this? UPDATE 1/19: Although Agfa do supply compatible ink for many printers including some Canon models, they do not support the popular Pixma Pro-1 or Pro-10 models. German Print-Klex do provide compatible inks for these printers but they are of unknown quality.

Cheers, Steve.

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