Our photography group met on Tuesday 07 May 2024 for a session dealing with the digital aspects of photography in the 2020s. One of the key inputs came from Simon D’Entremont, a professional wild life photographer based in Eastern Canada, who has an extremely useful and informative YouTube Channel. We chose his video on choosing the best format for digital photography (JPEG, RAW, CRAW), something that needs to consider the subject and the later processing of the image.

We then had a presentation showing what can be done with digital images to improve them, and the techniques that people employ. The demonstration introduced the GIMP (GNU Image Manipulation Program), with how to improve the brightness and sharpness of images, with some examples taken from the Kenton & District u3a Archive. The GIMP software is available free of charge and works on Windows, MacOS and Linux.

We then moved on to a presentation showing how to edit video files into a single file, including a demonstration of how to run titles, including the famous Star Wars effect. There was also a demonstration using a concert held in a local church, showing how shots can cross fade from one shot to another to make an interesting whole. The software demonstrated was Kdenlive (pronounced Kay-Den-Live) which is available free of charge and works on Windows, MacOS and Linux. We also saw how the software can be run from a USB stick, without it being installed on to a computer.

Lastly, we discussed the Photopea software which is used from an internet browser, and can be used free of charge, and aims to match the functionality of the leading professional digital image manipulation software without the annual cost of £270.

Our meeting room has just been equipped with a new Samsung Touch Screen Display, and we were able to use this for the session!