Digital Special Interest Group

by Jeff Colwell 29 September 2004

Digital-SIG members are interested in a wide range of graphical and audio-visual challenges that, in essence, transcend the needs of most people in the community. The group meets every second Tuesday between 1:00 pm and 2:30 pm at the Irish Club at Weston, ACT. The aim of the meetings is to discuss all topics of interest to the group including: equipment; techniques; new innovations; problem solving; etc. The group’s objective is to present at least one demonstration of special interest material at each meeting. The following snippets from past meetings might be of interest to PCUG members.

For more information on the Digital-SIG contact the convener: Jeff Colwell jeffmeg@webone.com.au or 6247 7756 (business hours).

Digital Photography

• Which is the best digital camera to buy? This is difficult to answer because it is really like any purchase, eg buying a car or a refrigerator. It depends on user requirements and so it is not possible to easily recommend a manufacturer, model or supplier.
   
• Not all Digital-SIG members own a digital camera yet. Pre-purchase research is very useful and members’ advice is available at Digital-SIG meetings. As with many new technological gadgets, prices keep coming down, and with the lower cost comes some higher capability gains.
   
• How many mega-pixels? Generally speaking, more mega-pixels means better pictures. A camera with at least 3 mega-pixels is a good starting point and would be reasonably useful for most needs.
   
• An alternative is to stay with film cameras for the time being because photographs produced this way provide quite higher resolution than current digital cameras of low to medium cost. Prints, slides or negatives from film can be scanned into your computer and there is far greater scope to manipulate/enlarge such pictures with good definition/clarity as a result.
   
• This is not to say that you should not buy a digital camera. They are a wonderful invention with great capabilities (amply demonstrated at Digital-SIG meetings) and it is a matter of conjecture (based on personal taste) whether photos are better produced by film or digital means. It should also be recognised that as digital photography has become more popular the demand for film and film processing has lessened and companies such as Kodak are reacting by reducing products and services.
   
• Optical zoom. Simply put, optical zoom means bringing an image closer by adjusting the optical lens of the camera. The image is optically magnified before a photograph is taken. If an optical zoom camera applies a resolution of say 1600 (width) x 1200 (height) pixels to an image, it does this to both non-zoomed and zoomed images. The picture quality is the same.
   
• Digital zoom. A camera applying digital zoom uses a single focus lens. The “zoomed” image is derived from a software/hardware enlargement of a small portion of the non-zoomed image. This is done by cropping the non-zoomed image so that only a small centre portion of it is used. The selected area is enlarged by interpolation. So, if the camera applies a resolution of say 1600 x 1200 pixels to a non-zoomed image and the cropped area to be “zoomed” represented only 640 x 480 pixels of the 1600 x 1200, the cropped area is enlarged by adding “smoothing” pixels amongst the existing 640 x 480 pixels to increase total pixels to 1600 x 1200. In reality, no more detail was added to what was in the original 640 x 480 image but the “zoomed” image is larger. In fact, there has been a loss of picture quality.
   
• This is not important when making most photo prints. The difference may be noticeable in large enlargements. Test it by putting an optically zoomed image and a digitally zoomed image into your computer and enlarge them. Individual pixels and picture blurring will start to appear much earlier in the picture taken with digital zoom than the one taken with optical zoom. This very simply illustrates the difference between digital and optical zoom and does not mean great pictures cannot be achieved using either method. It really depends on the intended use of the camera, eg happy snaps or enlarged images, and the capability of the camera. The foregoing helps to understand the preference for optical zoom over digital zoom.
   
• A lesson to be learned from history is that ancient texts and other materials exist today simply because they were recorded on durable materials. More importantly, they were copied and distributed. If you want to ensure the longevity of electronic files created today on tape, disk, CD, DVD etc, then copy them and as technology progresses, update the files to the latest hardware and software. The alternative, take to a nice flat rock with a hammer and chisel!

Manipulation/Enhancement Of Images

The group has seen wonderful demonstrations of:

• Paint Shop Pro V8 including a clone tool to join images together with a seamless join and levelling tools and distortion grids to allow correction of tilted perspective images of buildings.
• Stitch programs to join several panoramic landscape photos together, including a 360° panoramic view (also see site http://www.pixaround.com/ ).
• How to “repair” torn photographs and “replace” a small corner section of a photograph that had been torn away and lost.
• ProShow Gold V2 to import digital still images and sequence them in a slide show. Images can be panned, zoomed and rotated to give a moving image effect. Final output is usually to a Video CD or DVD. A sound track can be added.
• An outstanding demonstration involved the flight simulator-type software and showed the complexities of painting military and commercial aircraft surfaces with aircraft specific colour schemes, identification and trademark symbols. The complexity is involved in the distorting effect of curved aircraft fuselage surfaces and changing reflections of sunlight as an aircraft turns in the sky.

Recommended publications for Paint Shop Pro V8:

• How to Do Everything with Paint Shop Pro 8 by Dave Huss - McGraw-Hill. Cost about $36 at Dymocks.
• Paint Shop Pro 8 – fast and easy by Diane Koers - Premier Press. Cost about $35 from Dymocks (with Seniors discount).

Recording CDs/DVDs

Do you have 78s, 33LPs and 45s? If you know what these mean and you are interested in saving all of your most treasured music to modern media, then Digital-SIG has members who have done it. They can help you take out scratches and other annoying noises.

Scanning 35mm Slides

Have you got boxes and boxes of 35mm slides sitting in a cupboard (perhaps starting to deteriorate)? Don’t lose those early photos of your children, parents, grandparents and other relatives some of whom may have passed on. Scan precious photos, save them on CD and pass them on to your children who may one day become interested in genealogy.

If you don’t have the right equipment to record or scan, the PCUG centre at Belconnen does, so drop in and spend some time there.

Websites Recommended By Digital-SIG Members

• Anne G: Image hosting http://www.villagephotos.com/viewpubimage.asp?id_=8677596
   
• Bailey M: See http://www.inventa.com.au/ for full details of a High-Definition Digital-TV Tuner PCI card FusionHDTV DVBT released by Inventa Australia. For a price of $249 FusionHDTV DVBT offers high quality 1920X1080 pixel high definition digital TV program reception, recording, play-back, cut-editing, and converting to DVD/MPEG on Celeron/Pentium3/Pentium4/AMD PCs running MS Windows Me/2000/XP. The half-size PCI card carries antenna, SVideo, RCA video and analogue audio inputs, and has been built specifically to conform to Australia's DVB-T PAL digital TV broadcasting standard. For digital TV program reception, FusionHDTV DVBT allows channel scanning, channel switching, sub-channel listing and switching, multiple-aspect ratio switching (16:9 wide-screen, 4:3, full screen, etc), and arbitrary screen re-sizing. TV programs can be recorded to hard disk at any time, in either full stream or single sub-channel mode. The full stream recording captures all sub-channels of a specific digital TV station, therefore allows sub-channel selection during playback of the recorded video files - this means in one recorded TV program file, multiple channel contents can be selected for watching during play-back. Single-Channel only recording is useful for converting to DVD/DiVX files for video disk creation. High-quality still-images (currently 1440X1080 pixel maximum in Australia due to broadcasting bandwidth allocation limit), in multiple formats inc. JPEG, BMP, GIF etc, can be grabbed instantly and continuously from either live TV reception or recorded TV program files. Day-week recording schedulers can be set up for recording any TV program at any time. During TV watching and recording process, the current channel, video resolution, audio format etc are listed on the software's control panel which can be floated anywhere on the screen or hidden behind the video display window. Digital radio broadcasting by various TV stations can also be received.
   
• Charlie K: A site suggested for reviews on cameras and software is www.dpreview.com Having gone there you need to use the tabs on the left side of the page to get access to a whole raft of further pages, and I particularly like the "Forums"/"PC Tools" for user comments/help on various software packages.
   
• Greg B: A review of approx 500 digi cams http://ecoustics-cnet.com.com/4502-6501_7-0.html?tag=dir.new 
   
• Greg B: About.com is giving away loads of free graphics for private or commercial use if you give them credit so that they can get traffic to their site. Found at http://www.tudogs.com/clipart.php 
   
• Jeff C: Free program for photo enhancing etc http://www.irfanview.com/ download from TUCOWS.
   
• Jeff C: Paint Shop Pro 8.1 tools http://www.jasc.com/products/paintshoppro/nfeature1.asp 
   
• Jim H: Triscape's FxFoto Version 2.0.043 1.74mb. This program has some of the attributes of the much more expensive and complex Paint Shop Pro and Adobe Photoshop programs and would be ideal for those starting into manipulating and enhancing digital photographs. It is compatible with Windows98/ME/2000/XP and provides a single tool to automatically organize, enhance, annotate, e-mail, print, and archive your digital photos. A unique animated navigator frame displays photo thumbnails of all your pictures by topic, plus photos can be organized and searched by user-specified keywords. FxFoto's Standard Edition is freeware and includes all of this plus red eye correction, lighting and image enhancement, blemish removal, and a clone brush. The Deluxe Edition upgrade ($US 24.95) also creates animated slide shows, collages and stitched multi-photo panoramas with the same download. FxFoto was designed to give the novice to advanced amateur an easy-to-use package to address all the common photo software needs as well as offer unique features that help you publish and preserve your photographic memories with style. URL http://www.fxfoto.com/ 
   
• John H: The following URL describes (with screenshots) how to make a VCD with Nero 5.5+ http://www.videohelp.com/nero.htm and http://www.videohelp.com/ is a very useful site about video standards, capture, editing and burning.
   
• John H: Have a look at very active and large SIGs out of Melbourne PCUG:
• http://groups.melbpc.org.au/~digimage/ 
• http://groups.melbpc.org.au/~videoed/ 
• http://groups.melbpc.org.au/~videopro/ 
   
• John S: The two best camera review sites are http://www.dpreview.com/ and http://www.steves-digicams.com/

The Canon Photo stitch software makes really good panoramas - particularly when used with the panoramic mode in the cameras where the LCD displays 1/2 of the previous picture in the series to allow you to perfectly overlap. Also if you are not happy with the stitch point or matching – you can do it manually by an incredibly simple technique of dragging 3 small areas from one side of the stitch to the other, and overlaying 3 good stitch points.

• Mike D: Great digital photography website http://www.shortcourses.com/ and the http://www.shortcourses.com/using/cameracontrols/chapter1.htm is well worth a visit.
   
• Tony B: http://www.pixaround.com/ provides a program to produce rotating 360 degree panoramas. Problem is $'s as in PixMaker Value at US$49.95 or Pixmaker 1.0 at US$122.55. Worth a visit though to view the examples in Showcase>Application Scenarios at this site.
   
• Ted M: A free program for viewing and hearing (de-multiplexing/decoding) many multimedia formats is available (8 MB). It is the only viewer to let you see and hear some MPEG-4 formats. It works well with DVD, VCD, MPED, AVI, WMV etc with brightness-saturation contrast logo overlay filters, AUDIO including Real audio, S/PDIF, MP3 etc. It is very easy to use. As a player of almost any sound/or video formats. It is legal and FREE at www.videolan.org/vlc/

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