Just a Thought - Summer Pix

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The sun is so brutally hot that chickens lay poached eggs, the water at the beach is warm enough for soap instead of a swim suit, and, if you live in Florida, you monitor every Caribbean cloud formation for possible signs of a hurricane. It must be Summer and along with sunburns, snowballs, and sandals, the typical American will have several hundred megabyte of digital photos stuff into his or her computer after the season is done. If you're a Mac owner, then it's likely that those pix reside in iPhoto, Apple's legendary photo management tool.

But what to do with that bushel of digitized memories? Just leaving them in iPhoto 5, while tastefully organized, is silly; you took the pix to remember a moment, a scene, or just for the halibut. Come on, Zippy! The whole point behind taking pictures is so others can enjoy them. Why leave them stuck where only you can see them?

Back in the day, every time you visited that uncle who was the self-proclaimed family photographer, you had to sit for hours in a darkened room watching out of focus slides, or being forced to leaf through ancient, dusty photo albums while Aunt Edna force fed you her Famous Tapioca Raisin and Guava Recipe (dun-dun-dun-DUUUUUUUH!). No fun there.

Times have changed, my friends and, as a child of the Digital Age and a Mac user, you have a veritable truckload of options for getting your photos off the hard drive and in front of your intended audience in ways that won't send them running for the nearest exit.

The latest version of iPhoto 5, version 5.0.4, let's you do a lot of great things with photos, from easily sending them to loved ones directly via email, or through iCards, to publishing your photos directly from iPhoto to your .Mac Web page. All very cool, but your options don't end there. Let me point you to a few apps and procedures that anyone can get and master to produce some truly stellar ways to exhibit to photographic handiwork.

Nice Pix! But...

Even the best photographer can use a little extra post-production help, whether it be a simple touch-up or enhancements, or some major rework to give your pix that daring art nouveau look. There are too many options for me to go over here, but here are two great tools that every digital photographer will want to have; I'm referring to Graphic Converter and The GIMP.

I deal with a lot of photos, both while working and in my leisure time, and there's few things more frustrating than having a photo in one format and needing it in another. Even if you deal with digital photos on an infrequent basis, one tool you need to have is Graphic Converter from Lemke Software GmbH.

I did a review of GC early last year, when I found the app to be a nearly indispensable tool for doing a lot of the grunt work for handling photos. Need to resize or convert from RAW to JPEG? Hankering to hit those histograms? Graphic Converter is the tool for the job. 

But what really makes GC shine is its ability to process a batch of photos; resizing, converting from one format to another, even rename a whole folder full of images at once.

Why would you want to convert photo files from one type to another? Read on, Spanky!

A few years ago I found myself in Paris (France), and like any red-blooded American tourist, I took a lot of pictures. One of my favorite pix is of a flower shop I just happened to be walking by. The photo actually turned out just fine when I shot it with my old 2.2 megapixel Kodak DX-3600, but I wanted to do something more to it before printing and framing it; I wanted to give an artsy feel, kinda like one of those French art posters you see in framing shops. My problem was that I could only blow the photo up but so much before it started to pixelate badly. I needed a way to triple the size of my photo while making it look good.

To do the stuff I wanted to do the photo required some medium duty pixel manipulation, and while there are plenty of programs around that could do a reasonable job, Adobe's Photoshop would be the obvious choice for those who have it handy. Folks of lesser means won't feel ignore, however, because of a cool and absolutely free application called The GIMP.

With The GIMP, you can play with pixel to your heart's content; which is exactly what I did. The Gimp gives you such a pallet of tool that you'd be tempted to hire a graphic artist to decipher it all, but I suggest you poke and play: See what the Distort filter called 'Newprint' does, or find out how the 'Quick Mask' works. Don't worry, you won't screw up your precious photo; The Gimp allows multiple undos, and it shows you the results of your actions in another window.

I wound up selecting the filter 'Artisitic/Oilify', which gave my French Florist photo and oil painting-like look. Very artsy.  See?

The close-up on the right is the original photo, the left is after I GIMP-ified it.

The one problem with The GIMP is that it does not handle JPEG photos, they have to be converted to one of the other 20+ formats The GIMP can handle; hence the need for Graphic Converter. If I know I'm going to play with a bunch of photos I will move them to a working folder, converter them with GC, GIMP-ify them, then convert them back to JPEG. Sounds like a round-about way to play with your pix, but the alternative is to buy an application like PhotoShop.

The original of this photo is now 16"x 21" and very avant garde thanks to Graphic Converter and The GIMP

Speaking of PhotoShop; there's a GIMP hack which makes an attempt to match GIMP functions to those found in PhotoShop. The hack is called GIMPShop, and it does a fair job in approximating the look of PhotoShop. You still won't find all of the functionality contained in PhotoShop on the GIMP-hack version, but it is close enough that you could use tutorials and reference manuals for PhotoShop to learn some techniques. GIMPShop still can't handle JPEGs, however.

Regardless of the minor JPEG inconvenience, The GIMP is da bomb!

Slideshow Spielberg

OK, so you got a goob of digitized grins taken at last year's family reunion, and you're thinking how nice it would be to give dear Auntie Petunia a copy of all of those photos. The problem is that it makes little sense to print out and send 250 3x5s through the mail. Your Auntie may not be able to handle a computer but she can flip a page and manage the DVD player.

Hmmm. What's a favorite niece or nephew to do?

That's easy! You could send her a rockin' photo album of your own design, printed and delivered by Apple, or you could create a slide show of your photos complete with music and commentary, and send that to her.

Doing either is falling-off-a-log easy with the latest version of iLife: iPhoto 5 lets you create a book full of photo with a few mouse-clicks. The resulting album can be bound in a very nice hardback cover, or you can now choose other less expensive, nonetheless cool covers, priced to fit nearly any budget. iPhoto 5 also lets you create some really nice slide shows; complete with, music, special effects and transitions, which can be then exported as a movie.

If you want real creative control over your slide show, however,  I suggest you fire up iMovie, which now sports better integration with iPhoto and iDVD. iMovie gives you a much broader palette of options to pick from, and it lets you play with the soundtrack too, so you can narrate you show while Auntie Petunia's favorite music wafts in the background. The finished product, a movie, is then ready to burn on a disc and will be the hit of the family, so much so that everyone will want a copy.

Not too long ago I put together a nice slide show featuring my new niece. My sister-in-law still cries whenever I talk to her on the phone, she is so touched by the show. It took me about an hour to put it together, but I tell her I sweated over it for days.

I put the show of my niece on DVD using iDVD; it was easy to do and results were great, as my weepy sister-in-law will attest. Blank DVD media is getting cheaper, but it can't compete with the cost of blank CDs. The problem is that iDVD won't let you create Super Video CDs (SVCD): BAD Apple! Another problem is that DVDs made from your movies and produced from any application, not just iDVD, may only work on newer DVD players; it's an issue with the format of your newly created DVD; many older players can't read DVD-Rs (or DVD+R, or DVD ROM). 

Luckily for us, there's Toast 6 from Roxio.

Now, you can take that super slide show movie and burn it onto a regular, and much cheaper, CD, which is more likely to play on your Auntie's old DVD player than a DVD created from iDVD.  Toast 6 also lets you create regular video CDs in either PAL or NTSC standards. The controls are simple, and the burn process actually takes less time than burning a DVD, but only marginally so. Toast 6 is a must-have if you wish to distribute your photo wonders on the cheap.

Pretty Printing

After looking through your lot of photos, you've decided that dear Auntie Petunia  would keep you in her will if you gave her a nice set of photos of you and your family. You could print out 8x11 glossies and frame them, but you know that as soon as you do Uncle Jack will want his own copies; so will Grandma Tooty, Cousin Skip, Phoebie the family friend, and so on and so on and so on.

Wouldn't it be nice if you have a way to print a page full of photos at once, combining and customizing each page to suit the intended receiver?

Fear not, True Believers because Econ Technologies has an app for you: Portraits and Prints takes photo printing to a whole new level.  Using templates, you can create greeting cards, mailing labels, calendars, or include several photos on one page, complete with borders and text. There's templates that let you create labels and card using Avery stock too.

The Pro version of Portraits and Prints lets you create your own templates. With the  provided Template Manager you can download and manage hundreds of template, suitable for any occasion and need.

I used a nice announcement template to highlight a portrait of my new niece and my brother-in-law used it to show the rest of the family his new daughter.

Quick, easy, and professional looking announcements via Portraits and Prints

So, if you've a got hard drive full of photos and are looking for a creative ways to get them in the hands of friends and family, all you need is a little bit of time, a little bit of cash, and a little bit of imagination.

Summer vacation? Bring it on!