April, 2004 St. Joseph Valley Chapter Volume 37, No 4

ContentsContentsContentsContentsContents

Saving the World ................................................1President’s Column ...........................................2Editor’s Column ..................................................3April Meeting Notes ...........................................4Call for Presenters .............................................5New Senior Members Announced ...............6Worst Manual Contest ......................................7Chapter support .................................................8

Saving the WSaving the WSaving the WSaving the WSaving the World Oneorld Oneorld Oneorld Oneorld OnePixel at a TimePixel at a TimePixel at a TimePixel at a TimePixel at a Timeby Mark D. Stucky

“Beauty will save the world,” wroteDostoevsky. Although he would have valuedinner beauty more than eyeliner and plasticsmiles, beauty can inspire, ennoble, bring joy,and stir the soul.

We try to capture the world’s beauty inphotographs, but the limitations of ourcameras and our skills mean our photos don’tlive up to the beauty we have seen. So howdo we make a photograph of our kids, ourdog, or our company’s new widget morebeautiful (or in crass corporate terms, moremarketable)?

We can learn how to take better photos(more on that later), and/or we can learn howto enhance what we get. The ultimate toolfor the latter is Photoshop, the world’sleading image editing software.

Armed only with Photoshop and a mediocrepoint-and-click digital camera, in the lastfew years I have reluctantly becomeUtilimaster’s “official” photographer. I havebeen learning how to capture beauty better.

As one example of what can be done inPhotoshop, three photos of a Utilimastertruck body are shown here. The first is theoriginal image from the camera. The back-ground surrounding the truck is hideous andgreatly detracts from the image of the truck.

The second photo has gone through exten-

sive editing of brightness, contrast, and colorbalance. The background has been cut out,and an artificial drop shadow has been added.Enhanced and liberated from its clutteredbackground, the truck is…well, beautiful for atruck.

Photo #1

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WatermarkWatermark

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Photo #2

The third photo is a collage with a new dark-colored background that provides a bettercontrast for a white truck than white paper(at least on a high-resolution color brochure).The background’s globe elements implicitlyadd that Utilimaster is a world leader in itsindustry and that its trucks are world class.

To learn how to create better images, a fewyears ago I joined the National Association ofPhotoshop Professionals. For anyone whodabbles seriously in image editing, their website and publications are well worth theprice of membership. (If anyone is interestedin learning more about NAPP, check outwww.photoshopuser.com.)

Photo #3

Recently, for the first time, I also attendedthe Photoshop World Conference and Expoin San Francisco. It was similar to STC’sannual conferences in attendance and struc-

ture. Overall, its activities tended to bemuch more right-brained than the left-brained STC technical communication semi-nars—although many of the advanced func-tions of Photoshop are very technical indeed.

The other major difference was that insteadof having two dozen elective workshop tracksoperating at the same time, Photoshop Worldhad only three tracks. Each workshop hadhundreds of people in a large seminar room.Even though they had very large screens andprojectors, I learned at the first session thatI wanted to get to each classroom early andstake out a chair near the front—otherwiseseeing the details of the instructor’s demon-stration would be difficult. Although thesesessions were very large, I got a lot out ofthem because the workshop leaders wereoutstanding instructors (who often made atleast part of their living doing Photoshoptraining).

Photoshop helps us deal with the photo-graphs we have. We will examine how toshoot better photographs at our next STCchapter’s meeting. See the details on page 4.

New Senior MembersNew Senior MembersNew Senior MembersNew Senior MembersNew Senior MembersAnnouncedAnnouncedAnnouncedAnnouncedAnnouncedWe recently received notification from STCNational Headquarters that Senior memberstatus has been conferred on the followingindividuals:

Susan A. Antonovitz

Barbara L. Ridley

Melissa B. Bailey

Anne M. Kolaczyk

This means they have all been active mem-bers of the STC for five years.

Please join with us in offering them yourcongratulations when you next see them.

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