MacCORE Meetings
July General Meeting
Free and low cost alternatives to Photoshop.
Dee Sadler will be showing us alternatives to a professional application used in the graphic and web industry called Photoshop. Photoshop is a part of the Adobe Creative Suite and has a huge learning curve. It is meant for professionals and can do everything from painting with pixels to digital image manipulation to 3-D and video. It's more program than 80% of the people who have it even need. If you aren't taking your images to the printer, there are many more options out there.
Adobe Elements is a great alternative. It's very inexpensive, under $100 and does everything much easier than Photoshop. The one thing it doesn't do is save things in CMYK (Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, Black. Used in professional printing). For the majority of people who are either going to take their image to Costco/Walmart or their own inkjet printer at home to get them printed, great, no problem.
If $100 is too expensive for you and all you need is to do some very minor adjustments, there is a free service in Beta right now from Adobe called Photoshop Express. Photoshop Express lets you make adjustments like, red eye, color correction and the like. They basically took the most used features of Photoshop and brought them to you for free. The service is online only, and lets you make an album of your photos and share them with your friends and family. They give you 2 Gb of space for free and your friends see the images in a slideshow type environment. Pretty cool for free.
There is another free one out there called The Gimp, and Kevin Holm has demonstrated that one before, so we won't bother too much with that one except that it's worth finding out more.
The other one we'll be exploring in August is a program that uses an Adobe technology, but it's not an Adobe program, Aviary. Aviary is a collection of about 20 programs that do almost everything Adobe programs do. I said almost remember. Right now everything is in Beta and you get to pick 2 of the 20 to try out. Once you sign up, you can invite 5 friends to try them out with you. The Application itself is made with Adobe AIR (Adobe Integrated Runtime). AIR is both an internet application and it runs on your desktop.
The one we'll be looking at is somewhere between Photoshop Elements and Express. It does more than you'd think it does. It's called Peacock. Probably just a code name right now. Developers love their code names.
So if you are looking at alternatives for Photoshop, I'll see you at the August meeting.
Newsletter Committee
If you’d like to help produce the newsletter or just want to
learn, contact the Newsletter Committee. We’re looking for
writers, layout artists, and illustrators. It's great experience if
you’re considering a publishing / graphic design job.
Email article ideas, classified ads, and display ads to
newsletter@maccore.org. All materials are due the third Wednesday of
the month prior to publication (that is, materials for the July issue
are due by the June general membership meeting.)
This is your newsletter. If it is going to succeed, members need to
become involved. The few who volunteer their time are providing a
tremendous service and desperately need your help. Contact
newsletter@maccore.org to get information about how you can help.
Contact newsletter@maccore.org to get information about how you can help.
Board of Directors Meeting
Board meetings are open to MacCORE members. Please notify Kevin Holm, our President at kevin@maccore.org ahead of time if you’d like to attend.