Club notes 1 – Setting up the club

February 2009

We started off discussing what form the club should take and ended up deciding that a £10 annual fee with £2 per night would be reasonable to start with. This would, of course be open to change when we have been running for a year. Christine agreed to be the central focus of the administration side of things, keeping a list of members and collecting the subs.
We all identified ourselves and defined our experience of Photoshop together with what we most wanted to do in Photoshop.

Note: all these notes apply to Photoshop CS2, other versions may have slightly different variations.

As a result, we discussed cropping photos with the Crop tool (C), noting that:

• holding the Shift key down retains the original proportions,
  
• moving the cursor outside the crop rectangle and dragging it round rotates it,
• typing in numbers in the Height and Width boxes on the tool Options bar along the top constrains the proportions to those numbers.

We then moved on to removing spots, or adding bits from another part of the picture to cover over a blemish using the Clone Stamp tool (S). There are other tools that do similar things, the Healing Brush and the Patch tool (J).
The essence of all these tools is that you decide what part of the image you want to pick up to replace with by clicking whilst holding down the Alt key and then click on the bit you want to replace. Note, you can pick up from a different layer and even a different image.

Having sorted out pictures out, at least to a certain extent, what about sending them by e-mail or putting them on to a website? The main consideration is the size of the picture in Pixels. Hard and fast rules are difficult to lay down, but typically about 500 pixels along one side will download reasonably quickly look reasonable when displayed on a 14 inch (35 cm) diagonal screen (about 12 x 8 inches or 30 x 22 cm). This will not printout very well however.
The other consideration is the quality (not discussed as such but added here for completeness). Pictures are (almost) always compressed when they are saved either to a memory card in the camera or to a computer's hard disk and the degree of compression changes the file size as well as reducing the number of pixels does – but of course
quality is lost.
The size, number of pixels, is changed in the menu: Image | Image Size. Usually reducing the number of pixels on the height or width will automatically reduce the other number thus retaining the proportions.
The quality, amount of compression, is changed in the menu: File | Save for Web dialog box. Here you have the opportunity to save in different formats as well as quality, a good rule of thumb is to stick to JPEG which can be read by all computers and web browsers, word processors etc.
When putting pictures on a website a lot of people put a very small picture, about 50-100 pixels wide on the web page with a link to a larger one for anyone who might want to print it out.

We then talked about resolution – the number of pixels per cm or inch.
Note this is different from the printer's dots per inch.
Since all word processors and most other ways of printing allow re- sizing of the picture on paper, number of pixels is probably a better way of understanding resolution.
To get a reasonable print, the picture needs to have about 300 pixels per inch (about 120 pixels per cm) so to print out on and A4 page, you need to have about 3,500-4,000 pixels along the long edge.

Then, we talked about keyboard shortcuts.
A lot of the commoner shortcuts are shown in the menus, just as in many other programs, but there is a full list to be found at the bottom of the Edit menu. There are three sections, Application Menus, Palette Menus and Tools.
On the right hand side there is a Summarize button which will prepare an HTML document for you to keep if you want to.

A final snippit, we added a Hue/Saturation adjustment layer:
Layer | New Adjustment Layer | Hue/Saturation then OK and then dragged the Saturation Slider to the extreme left. This turned the picture into black & white.
Select the Brush tool (B) and change the foreground to black, Default colours (D) then Swap foreground and background colours (X).
Paint over the Hue/Saturation layer and bring back some areas of colour, Swap colours (X) and paint to revert to black & white.

RGP