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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