Barry Beckham

Igor Thats all looking pretty good. Barry

Daveg I don't know if it was a print competition too, just projected, but I lost interest when I heard that nonsense. Ed Here is my take on all of this. These rules and regulations are another battle in someones demented war on digital photography. I don't want to/can't be bothered to learn any Photoshop work so you shouldn't either is their way of viewing the world. Have you noticed how much they talk about not needing to know anything about Photoshop? If they don't need to use it, then shut up about it and concentrate on producing some decent photography. Why do they feel the need to continually justify not using any afterwork. Your absolutely right about "urinating into the wind" but if we stand together perhaps the stream will start to push them back I am getting sick and tired of this nonsense and those who utter it. They may as well hang a sign around their necks which reads. Mediocre Photographer at work who can't be bothered.

Jfa Yes, it's Alien Skin Snap Art and I am quite happy with the effects it gives and there are loads of sliders and options that should keep me busy for ages. To be honest there are so many of these filter programs around that if your not careful you can almost give over your life to trying them all. The thing with filters in my view is that you rarely get a result straight out of the box and if you do, so do a 10,000 other people and our images then all look the same. I think the trick is just a little work with the filters of your choice and Photoshop/Elements. After all any filter will have a different effect depending on the resolution of the image used. Most of the time I use filters it is with a greatly reduced resolution because they just don't work well on high resolution images, unless your intention is a 6ft by 4ft print.

Minimum or no pan/zoom/rotate allowed. Sound and image start and end together. Minimal digital manipulation of the images. 1 entry / competition (even though there is more than one section) Submit in DVD format (not EXE ....) They do make me laugh. They say minimal image manipulation as if they could actually tell anyway. There is one other rule they should apply. Only unsharp and badly exposed images must be used. Any sign of good quality photography is NOT allowed. You can almost see some rustic group sitting round a table all with their thinking caps on coming up with the rules and seeing just how much rubbish they can cram in. The sad thing is people go along with this because they don't want to upset or offend. Well, perhaps its time we did start to offend, if that is what it takes. I have just spent 3 days at the Photographic Society of Queensland convention and heard lots of knowledgable speakers talk on a variety of subjects. It was a great event and brilliantly organised, but if I hear just one more photographer say " I like to get my photography right at the taking stage and not have to put right mistakes in Photoshop" I will poke them with a sharp stick. All my respect for them evapourates when they say that as it shows their ignorance. I heard of one competition rule the other day where digital images have to be submitted without any manipulation at all and straight from the camera. What about Raw shooters? Do they really think this is the way to quality photography and to inspire others. Either they should change their hobby or perhaps I should. I mean what rules does AV need. 1. All digital slide shows should be provided as an exe file to run on a PC projector at x resolution 2. Sequences should be no longer than 7 minutes 3. Any special software or projection equipment outside of 1 above must be supplied by the club/author Do we need much else? And here is a final thought, seeing at the film buffs tried to hold back and ban digital for so long, let us now ban them from digital AV competitions, just for spite eh

Tip Try blending a filtered version of your image with an unfiltered one. (layers in Photoshop etc) It often allows the effect to be tempered for a much better effect or tempered in isolated places.

I say old man........This just ain't Cricket What fun, keep this thread going, its better than TV Here is something amusing. I have just seen an AV competition here in Queensland and I think it took me longer to read and digest all the rules and paperwork attached to the email than it would have taken me to make the sequence.

Dom Many thanks, that is what I needed

Davy I was thinking about it and hearing what peoples views were, but havn't taken the plunge yet. I have been asked by a potential buyer of PTE works on 64 bit and I realized I didn't know for sure. The question was in relation to Vista 64 bit actually, so perhaps my question should be, does PTE run well on Vista 64 bit? Many thanks

Does anyone run PTE on a 64 bit machine OK?

Dave G You will find an untouched (No manipulation at all from a raw file) Canon 1ds Mk3 image at http://www.beckhamdigital.co.uk/daveg.zip but, really what is the point? You are looking for evidence of a problem that most users of Photoshop never actually see in practical use. I understand that some people like the technical side of the hobby, but whatever you find it will not alter the fact that the advice we should be giving newer users of PTE is simple Save your images as a jpg at level 6 and you won't go far wrong. What is the point in making one of the more simple tasks in the making of a slide show appear more difficult than it is. I had a slide show link sent me yesterday, but the slide show looks awful on my monitor because it is being enlarged way beyond what the author expected or even knew about. See my point about quality? All it needed was one little box ticked and his show would have looked great. What level he chose to save his jpg images at is not irrelavent. I hear the same arguments about unsharp mask, but my advice is always the same. Forget what you have been told about over sharpening as all of that advice is generally aimed at high resolution images destined for printing. In AV we do not print our images, we do not enlarge them and what we see at actual pixels is what we get. In addition to that, the image will be on screen for only a few seconds. So, if an image needs a little more sharpness and it is not obviously way overdone then I say give it what you think it needs.

If you want a full frame image from a Canon 1ds Mk3 I can provide you with one, but don't forget sharpness and quality come not only from the pixels, but from the lighting, exposure, manipulation, image content, etc etc etc

Not sure when I will get that far south, but I am sure to let you know. I am introducing Noosa Club Members to a PTE demo next Monday and setting a 10 image competition that they can attempt with the trial software. I am sure once they have a little dabble with PTE they will get hooked. On another note I tried PSG again the other day and it could not handle the same show made for PTE. I had the latest version, but the transitions lacked smoothness.

Is not an image saved at level 6 on a 22mp camera bigger than one from a 12mp camera? I have no idea, never had reason to find out to be honest. All I know is that if you start out with great quality, that quality is still evident when the image is reduced in size. I noticed that years ago when a friend bought a really top of the range film scanner. You could see the difference in his images even at 8in by 6in email images. With regards the Moire effect, that is a battle that each individual has to deal with and I do seem to experience it quite a bit whenever I animate an image. That is why you don't see too much animation from me. As you probably know there are lots of ways to deal with the moire effect, but they all effect image quality in some way. I have had many occasions where an animation seemed appropriate, but I had to give up the idea, because I could not get rid of the moire effect and was not prepared to accept a soft image just to use animation. Of course the best way to defeat the moire effect is not to animate DaveG I have just created a crop from an original image and saved it at different Jpg compressions 12,6 etc and I cannot see any difference and I am looking at images from a 22mp camera on a brand new flat screen. I have three other people here with me and they can't tell either, so that rules out my eyesight. Don't you think there is an obsession with this potential loss of quality? I happen to like and agree with your particular obsession, because I rather think it is the same obsession as mine. Image quality ! It is essentail in my view to what we do, but how come that in about 15 years of working with Photoshop I have not seen evidence of this loss of quality? We save our images for a slide show, they will not be enlarged, they will not be printed, what we see is what we get. I even tried to re-create this loss of quality once by repeatingly saving the image and couldn't do it. For general advice to those who ask, why not keep the answer simple. Save a level 6 and you will retain a good balance between image quality and image size for the slide show. Many of the problems experienced by newer users are caused by the images being too large, which we have seen in this forum. I am not suggesting that it is wrong to save images for a show at Level 12 and for those who know what they are doing and they PC will handle the files fair enough, but I do believe that it would cause more problems than it would solve if that is passed on as the best advice for all. I am sure that time will change this and in a few years we will be dropping 20meg files into our slide shows, well perhaps

Peter I mean both actually and perhaps DaveG is right and I need a visit to the optician, but I say again I don't have any issues with image quality and get asked over and over again how I get my images to clear and sharp in my slide shows, so I must be doing something right Lets be honest, if a fraction of the effort put into this subject was redirected into image content and other AV quality issues AV's all round would be far better. If we tell newer users of PTE to save a Jpg at level 6 they will not be confused by all the differences in opinions and they will make a great slide show. I suppose there could be one explanation and that is if you reduce the quality from a very high end camera (22Mp) in Photoshop down to match the pixels of a lower end camera (6Mp) the images are not the same. You get better quality from the high end reduced size camera. However, I don't think it changes my thoughts at all and I will continue using level 6

This might be another angle and hope on topic, since I have not read anyone taking the individual JPEG file compression into concideration Laszlo Laszlo Personally, I don't think compression is an issue that is very important and I also feel that many get wrapped up in it because they have been told that quality can be lost. Perhaps it is a deficiency on my part, but save a jpeg at level 6 and 12 and I can't see any difference and nor can anyone else who I have asked. I have never used a compression higher than 6 for any of my slide shows and image quality is not an issue that I compromise on. If there was the slightest evidence that a image saved at level 12 appeared on screen better than level 6 I would change immediately. If there is a change, I can't see it

I tried, but he seems reluctant to do that

Peter It was called Leaving from an album called Winjana by Tony Occonor

Laszlo Thank you for the reply and after the amount of typing you did I am almost reluctant to say that you have misunderstood the thread. I do know what I am doing and I also lecture on topics such as PTE and Photoshop. The issue of size did not refer to the length of the show at all, but the image size. I already know the answer to the question I posed, but I was interested in the views of other serious users. If you read my posts again, you will see what I mean

Yaughtsman I understand what you mean better now, but progress doesn't stop, the same thing was said at 6MP and look where we are now. It will continue to grow I think.

Yaughtsman I appologise if I am misunderstanding you, but those sizes I posted were not manipulated in any way. They are straight opened files into Photoshop from a Canon 5D and Canon 1Ds. I don't really know what you mean by The comment was an illustration on the camera progression, not what can be acheived by manipulation. Dave G The bottom line is that YOUR monitor resolution/aspect ratio should determine what you produce. Your images should be the same resolution as YOUR monitor (unless you go for "window mounting"). You CAN adapt your work to suit other aspect ratios and in your line of work is, I suppose, desirable. The trouble with this Dave is that we have been doing that for the past few years and in those few years technology has left our 800*600 and 1024*768 pixels shows a little behind. Size isn't everything, but a 1024*768 slide show looks a little lost on the screen I am now using. That is what prompted the thought and I suppose the question I am pondering now, will that continue and can I take some action now to build in some future proofing. Suppose I take my 1920*1200 monitor size image and prepare them in future at double size. I then get images at 3840*2400 pixels and although the show may not run super smooth at this size, as long as I can create the template show, it wouldn't matter that much, because this show would never be meant for showing. Once that was made, not only can I create any format I want, (PTE5.6 has made this less important) reasonably quickly with just a picture size change, but I have enough pixels to cope with perhaps the next flat screen monitors we may buy.

I hope you realize that I wasn't asking for any moderation in any shape or form. All I suggested that if those who post most, including myself, tried to keep in mind how easy it was to drift off topic. it would perhaps help.

Yaughtsman Andre was talking about a 12 Mb/image and I assumed he meant an opened image. I was just going by the images we have here from the original Canon 5D (12.7 Megapixel) that open up on screen at 36.4Mb. That is what the image size window says in Photoshop and the 1Ds (21 Megapixel) shows at 60.2 Mb These are both 8 bit images, open them as 16 bit and they double in size The New 5D captures around the same number of pixels as my camera so I assumed the new 5D will open up in Photoshop to around 60Mb, or close to it

André I think a resolution of 1920*1080 isn't a bad standard, but what I am not so keen on how much I would have to crop off the top and/or bottom of the images from my camera format. You have to cut off enough that it could interfere with the composition of some images. A bit like the effect we already get with 1024*768 and 1280*1024, but on the width rather than the height. I believe the resolutions of digital camera's will not go any further then the high end camera's of today (12 Mb/image), because of its limitations in storage and handeling on PC's I think we are way above cameras of 12Mb already and images of 30Mb on screen is not uncommon. The new Canon 5D Mk2 must be around that size and my 1Ds opens at 30Mb. My idea is to create shows well above these specs (as a template) and build in some protection for the future without having to remake shows later. Its not as though it is a quick process to put together a slide show.

Well, perhaps you could make a list of all those subjects that cause ponderous debate so I can avoid them. The last thing I want to do is offend. Or, you could not read them

Well, why add something to a post that is obscure, which you must know will go over most peoples heads? How does that help a discussion?