The Digital & Practical Group meets in the club rooms on the last Tuesday of a month at 7:30pm during the season (September to March but not December). Meeting dates are given in the SYLLABUS [PDF] . All members and visitors are welcome. The group was formed in 2001 with the objective of keeping members informed and providing some instruction on the rapid advances in digital photography now taking place.

Most of our meetings focus on techniques for post-processing photos to prepare them for presentation as high quality prints or for projection. Members typically bring their own laptops along so they can try out the techniques as they are demonstrated and we discuss them. Example images to work with are usually provided, either on USB sticks or via Dropbox. Most members are now using Affinity Photo rather than Photoshop, so sessions tend to focus on the use of Affinity Photo. [Affinity Photo for Windows, Mac or iPad. Tutorials]. If you are using other software you are still likely to find useful the techniques we demonstrate and discuss.

Some of our meetings cover other kinds of topics, such as using the manual controls on cameras.

 2022-23 season

March 28th: CANCELLED

February 28th: A challenge. For this meeting some members made a composite image using at least 3 of their own photos. We discussed the various techniques used.

January 31st: We looked at various options for putting together a sequence to be projected. From simple file lists through presentation software to full audio-visual sequences. Including how to ensure the sequence plays within a given time limit - our members' nights usually allow 10 minutes per presenter. The notes from this are being written up to be made available here soon.

October 25th: We studied the manual control of cameras (and phones) - going beyond auto. Understanding f-numbers can help enormously in taking better photos. As can knowledge of the hyperfocal distance. The slides from this meeting are now available as a PDF here.

 What we did in the 2021-22 season

In the September and October meetings we worked through our printed booklet about the basic workflow for processing photos.

In the next 3 meetings we worked through another set of printed notes on the use of Layers, Selections and Masks

In the March meeting Graham demonstrated in detail how his winning "Keyboards" image for the President's Trophy was created, right from the initial stages with the camera. This provided a recap on our recent studies of layers, selection and masks. We went on to consider some other things, including the use of gradients and some aspects of colour (RGB, HSL, CMYK, etc) for which there is another set of printed notes.

All of the printed notes are available free to members. They are also available online as PDFs: see under "Software tutorials" on our links page.

 A problem and fix found in the first meeting

Two members found that not all of the tools down the left side of the Affinity screen were visible on their laptops. In particular they could not see the Perspective correction tool. It seemed to be off the bottom of the screen, inaccessible. This was probably due to the display resolution settings of their PCs.

We found a solution. On the View menu select "Customise Tools..." and there is an option to increase to 2 the number of columns in the tool box.

 Some topics we have covered in previous meetings.

There many ways of doing useful things with multiple exposures, even of the same scene. Graham Relf gave a presentation on the subject in October 2020 which may be seen here as an MP4 video.

See also our Hints & tips page

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