The meetings are free and open to the public. Please bring a friend.
Year 2002 Meeting Dates:
• December 5 -- Made It Myself Cards & Stationery
by Hersch Nitikman & Sue Rudnicki
Color printers are so cheap and capable these days that many people are producing their own
greeting cards and stationery. The advantage of Made It Myself cards and stationery is that
you can use your own photos, as well as choose your own text for the sentiment.
-- Click here for more details.
The following listings show what topics have been covered recently. See what you missed!?
• November 7 -- Selecting a Digital Camera
There are strategies you can use to help choose a digital camera
that suits your needs. Reviews are helpful, but you have to realise
the reviewer may have different interests or needs than you. This
can range from intended use of the camera to just how it feels in
your hands -- if your hands are much different in size or flexibility than the reviewer's those controls that the reviewer praised
or panned because of their perfect or awkward locations may suit
you much differently.
We'll be talking about various features and their consequences, as
well as how to make the most out of time spent at the store playing
with the likely candidates.
-- Click here for more details.
• October 3 -- Managing Your Images
Digital cameras are wonderful because it doesn't cost anything to take a
picture. The result, if you're like me, is you take a lot *more*
pictures. But how do you keep track of them all, so when someone says
something about a pelican and dolphin feeding frenzy you can quickly
retrieve your pictures of a similar event?
There are a multitude of packages out there to help you, ranging from
the very simple, like cPicture, all the way through to high-end systems
suitable for photo stock houses. We'll focus on the ones for individuals
that range in cost from free up to $250 or so.
-- Click here for more details.
• September 5 -- Introduction to Acrobat 5
presented by Mike Burns
Adobe Acrobat is a product that has made it possible to publish documents electronically and deliver them on the Web, on CD-ROM, and even on paper.
The "look" of the document is preserved regardless of what computer system it is displayed on, and the document can contain text, graphics, and live hyperlinks to
other parts of the document, other documents, or other web sites. Come and learn how to make use of this tool.
-- Click here for more details.
• August 1 -- The Digital Darkroom: Solutions for Problem Images
presented by Hersch Nitikman & Dana Trout
In recent meetings we've looked at how to deal with issues like red-eye, color correction, pulling out shadow detail, and resizing images. But what about some of
the other problems that come up from time to time? Tonight we will show
some solutions to the following problems:
• Creating a good image from a torn or otherwise damaged print
• Making an acceptable image from a photo that has multiple colored
light sources
• Colorizing a black & white picture (great for family heirlooms or
Made-it-Myself cards)
• Making a decent print from a photo with a backlit subject.
-- Click here for more details.
• Tuesday July 2 -- Video on the Web
presented by Jeremy Rex, Sorenson Media
A picture may be worth a thousand words but sometimes even that's not enough, and only a video will serve your needs. There is a big problem though -- video file sizes are huge compared to those for pictures. If you thought it was World Wide Wait while waiting for a picture to download, you can see you need to pull some tricks to make the download time of a video tolerable.
Jeremy Rex, who works for Sorenson, will show us how to prepare a short video for the web using Sorenson Squeeze. The resulting video downloads relatively quickly and can be viewed in the standard QuickTime player.
Jeremy will also show us Sorenson Vcast, which lets you do streaming video on
the Web.
-- Click here for more details.
• June 6 -- News for New Authors and Self Publishers
• May 2 -- Cool Tools
Although image-manipulation programs like PhotoShop have many features,
sometimes it is preferable to use other tools as well. We will be looking
at several tools that (usually) quickly correct the brightness, contrast, and color of pictures.
-- Click here for more details.
• April 4 -- Preparing Pictures for Viewing
The overall goal of taking pictures is to show them to someone, even if it's yourself. And you'd like the pictures to be worth looking at! Tonight's meeting will focus on how to massage the picture you've taken and prepare it for viewing.
-- Click here for more details.
• March 7 -- How do I Share My Pictures?
Pictures used to be so easy -- you'd get prints and then stick them in an album (or shoebox) and pull them out to look at them and share them with others. Now we have a lot more choices about how to share them and sometimes it isn't easy to figure out the best way. Tonight we'll cover the relative advantages of photographic prints, inkjet prints, email attachments, web galleries, and CD-ROMs.
-- Click here for more details.
• February 7 -- Digital Video
Harold Adams of www.SBLife.com will
cover the basics of how to take digital video and prepare it for
several different purposes: as a tiny clip to attach to email, as a
larger format QuickTime movie that can be played from a CD or web
site, and even an introduction to VideoCD and DVD, both of which can
be played on most modern DVD players.
-- Click here for details.
-- Click here for the meeting report.
• January 3 -- Digital Photography
So Santa rewarded you for being so good by bringing you a new digital camera and now you want to do all the things the ads implied would be easy to do: print photo-quality prints, send pics of the twins to Grandma via email, and maybe add some pictures to your web pages.
But somehow those smiling people in the catalogs and ads seem to be having a much easier time of getting something that anyone would like to look at than you -- what could be the matter?
-- Click here for details.
-- Click here for the meeting report.
-- Click here to see the article "Things to consider when purchasing a Digital Camera".
-- Click here to see the article "My Experiences With a Digital Camera".
• December 6 -- Printing, Marketing, and Fulfillment
Bill Frank of One 2 One Direct will tell us about the three hardest jobs for
any author turned publisher: printing, marketing and distributing
the book, and how these challenges can be met.
-- Click here for details.
-- Click here for the meeting report.
-- Click here to download Bill's PowerPoint presentation.
• November 1 -- Best Books, Seminars, and Other Sources of Information
One of the most valuable things about a club like the GDTPUG is that the members share their finds and treasures
with one another. The bookstore is filled with hundreds of books all purporting to be *the* one you should own,
and you suspect that they can't *all* be right. Not only that, but there are also many seminars, classes, and web
sites also clamoring for your time and money. At tonight's meeting members will describe their personal favorite
sources of information, and why they like them.
-- Click here for details.
-- Click here to see the compendium of members' favorite resources.
• October 4 -- Time Lapse Digital Photography
Bryan Mumford is an inventor and has developed a device which allows people to
take photographs at precise times after a triggering event. This
device, which he sells as "The Time Machine", allows high speed
photographs of popping balloons (in mid-pop), the brief splash of a
milk drop, unattended photographs of wildlife, and time lapse movies
of clouds or flowers opening. Demonstrations and sample
photographs will be shown.
-- Click here for details.
• September 6 -- MGI PhotoSuite 4, VideoWave 4, & PhotoVista Virtual Tour
David Whittle, an MGI representative, will be demonstrating these products:
• August 2 -- Choosing a Scanner
You've got pictures, slides, and/or negatives you want to scan. There are
all these scanners available, starting at well under $100 -- how do you
choose among them all?
-- Click here for details.
• July 5 -- Silent Auction and Informal Q & A
It’s time to open your closet and clear out all that valuable stuff and useful
artifacts that are just sitting there and sell them to someone else.
There will be lots of recent DTP and computer books up for bid, so if you need
to update your technical library, this is the time and place to do it.
-- Click here for details.
• June 7 -- Publishing a Book on a Hybrid CD
Short runs of books with lots of color pictures are quite expensive to produce -- on paper, that is.
Now that most people have computers, and most of these computers have access to the Internet
and also have CD-ROM drives, we have some low-cost alternatives. There are a few important
considerations, though. One is not everybody has the same kind of computer -- Windows,
Macintosh, Linux, and others all have their adherents and you would like your book to be
readable on any of them. If you publish on the Internet there is no problem, but if you
publish on a CD you will need either several varieties of CDs or what is known as a "hybrid"
CD. We will have a Windows computer and a Mac and show how to make a CD that make both happy.
-- Click here for details.
-- Click here to see associated article.
• May 3 -- Publishing a Music CD
Susan Rudnicki has published several music CDs as a home hobbiest.
Her presentation will show that there's still a lot of paper-based publishing
involved in the packaging of digital content; in fact, much more than when
she published audio cassettes!
-- Click here for details.
• April 5 -- What Happened to My File?
Sometimes I feel like an idiot because I saved a file but I didn't
note just where the application put it. Other times I have copied files
or images to CDs (hundreds of CDs). Now I want it but where to
look?
-- Click here for details.
-- Click here to see associated article.
• March 1 -- Publishing on the Web
Most people start off using email, then start attaching photos. Publishing
web pages is better than email with attachments because the photos download
from a web page in half the time that an email attachment does, and you
get to intersperse descriptive prose and captions with the photos, which
you cannot do in email attachments. Creating web pages has become quite easy,
and many of the tools are free. Also, many of the dial-up ISPs now provide
free space for your web site. We'll look at several of the freebies and
show how easy it is to construct a simple web site.
-- Click here for details.
• February 1 -- Great Acrobat Tricks
Mike Burns will show us some of the things he has learned about publishing in Acrobat.
He uses it to publish large proposals and technical documents at work, and has also found
it useful for capturing whole web sites for offline perusal.
-- Click here for details.
• January 4 -- Printing Pictures
We will have Tom's Epson 2000P and Dana's Epson 1200 printers and demonstrate
color calibration, paper selection, bulk ink systems, and how to get
closer to what you expected in the first place
-- Click here for details.
• December 7 -- Owner's Perspectives on Digital Cameras
Meryl Wieder and Bryan Mumford share their experiences, tips, and
tricks relating to digital photography
-- Click here for details.
• November 2 -- Auction Night
-- Click here for details.
• October 5 -- Field trip to Richard Armstrong Photolab
Richard Armstrong and crew will demonstrate their new walk-in facility. They
can print a TIFF file on their Fuji Frontier photographic printer
-- Click here for details.
• September 7 -- Creating a Color Brochure in QuarkXPress and Using Direct-to-Plate
Printing
Chris Nolt explored the basics in Quark and explained the latest
"film less" four color printing process
-- Click here for details.
• August 3 -- Share the Knowledge
We'll bring our favorite (and not-so-favorite) DTP books and tell why they
are wonders or clunkers
-- Click here for details.
• July 6 -- Channeling Images -- Click here for details.
• June 1 -- So you bought/want a Digital Camera -- Now What? -- Click here for details.
• May 4 -- Getting the Picture -- Click here for details.
• April 6 -- Printing Pictures -- Click here for details.
• March 2 -- Graphic Traffic Field Trip -- Click here for details.
• February 3 -- Web Site Creation and Management -- Click here for details.
• January 6 -- Digital Photo Albums -- Click here for details.
• December 2 -- Creating a family record of image and text files on a CD -- Click here for details.
• November 4 -- Photoshop 5.5: Is the upgrade worth it? -- Click here for details.
• July 8 -- Electronic Documents -- Click here for details.
• May 13 -- Creating a Web Site with DreamWeaver by Roy Prince -- Click here for details.
• April 8 -- DTP by Example -- Click here for details.
• March 11 -- Creating a Web Site by Mike Burns -- Click here for details.
• February 11 -- Making a CD Disk -- Click here for details.
• January 14 -- PhotoShop Mini-tutorial -- Click here for details.
• December 3 -- PageMaker Mini-tutorial -- Click here for details.
• November 5 -- Commercial Printer Issues by Kami -- Click here for details.
• August 6 -- Adobe PhotoShop 5.0 demo -- Click here for details.
• June 4 -- Adobe Illustrator by Bob Staudenmaier -- Click here for details.
• March 5 -- Quark Express by Chris Nolt -- Click here for details.