January 12, 2006: Adobe Photoshop Elements 4.0

Continuing the digital photography theme, D. M. LaGanis demonstrated this latest version of Adobe Photoshop Elements, Version 4.0. We learned to effortlessly enhance photos with automatic red eye removal, simple skin tone correction, and learned about new selection tools that make adjusting specific areas of a photo fast and easy. Keep your photos at your fingertips with new ways to find and view them, including face finding, advanced searches and enhanced folder organization. We saw how to show off our creativity in countless ways, from exciting dynamic slide shows to one-click online printing and enhanced Photo Mail.

February 9, 2006: Practical Uses of Photoshop Elements and a Slide Presentation by the Digital Photography SIG

The presentation highlighted the works of the MHCUG Digital Photography SIG. Following the slide show, was a presentation of simple and practical photo manipulations.

March 9, 2006: Production of the video "Walkway Over the Hudson" by Duane Biever

Former MHCUG member Duane Biever has joined the digital revolution of photography. He demonstrated how the video camera has become a part of his computer life in the production of an episode for his TV Magazine show on Time Warner Cable Channel 23 The demonstration included the use of Pinnacle Studio 9 and Ulead Video Studio 6 video creation software on the Compaq Presario 6000 computer, with a Dazzle Hollywood DV Bridge and a Sony Digital-8 camcorder as digital input devices in the production of his “Walkway Over The Hudson.” This reference is to the railway bridge that connects Poughkeepsie to Highland, New York. The DVD that he created was shown following the demonstration.

April 13: Whittle's Picks for the Digital Home -
Quality Technologies and Products Anyone Can Use

David B. Whittle, author of "Cyberspace: The Human Dimension" and named by Working Woman Magazine as "one of America's most original technological thinkers." Dave has been a leader in the PC revolution since 1979, and an opinion-leader in the PC industry since his days as OS/2 Evangelist at IBM in the early '90s. Most recently, he's been writing for Smart Computing.
Dave demonstrated muvee autoProducer,Version 5, which enables even beginners to create home movies and DVD's in record time. PhotoVista 3.5, the second product, has the capability of stitching digital camera photos together for a 360 degree interactive view. And lastly, he told us about Invisus Security Solution, a subscription service which offers maximum protection for personal computers, identity theft insurance and unlimited phone service.

May 11, 2006

Linda Ritch demonstrated the Microsoft Digital Image Pro Suite 10. The program consists of three parts for editing images, storing images and creating a story presentation.

June 8, 2006

Paul Dats, president of Inkpress Paper, presented detailed information about paper and inks for printing pictures. He described their Piezoghraphy Neutral K7 inks that are pure pigment, not dye based. Prints using these inks are much more permanent than dye based inks.

July 13, 2006

Mark Hoops, from the NY State Attorney's office, assisted by his daughter Kristen, talked about the Internet and the undesirable things it makes available to children. It is difficult to completely prevent children from accessing undesirable material. Parents must establish a good dialog with the child to establish proper use of the Internet.

August 10, 2006

OneCare and Defender by Peter Dowley
There were 3 goals for August's main presentation: give an overview of Microsoft's "Windows Live"(tm), give overviews of Windows Live OneCare and Windows Defender (Beta 2), and have live demo's for our club.

September 14, 2006

Jen Clausen from Sandhills Publishing Co. presented details about Smart Computing magazine and related services they provide. She also briefly described other magazines they publish: PC Today and Computer Power User.

October 12, 2006

Brian Connelley of WorkGroup Associates Inc. presented an interesting program on Autonomic systems and Groupware. Autonomic originally referred to the part of the nervous system that acted automatically rather than from external inputs. As applied to computing systems, it means automatic operation not requiring external guidance. (e.g. A router should be able to query a network and build the router tables without external guidance.) Brian described some of the key contributors whose work led up to the current status.  

November 9, 2006

Photo Image Storage. Jerry Greenberg, a member of our club, presented a program about organizing the large amount of data created by the current digital cameras. He started by reviewing some facts about digital cameras. In 2000 a good camera had 2 or 3 million pixels and each picture used about 1.1 M bytes of storage. By 2005 good cameras had 8 M pixels and each image file was 3 or 4 M bytes JPG format.  

December 14, 2006

David Caesar-Dare assisted by Deborah Meisels from the Westchester PC Users Group presented their more than fifty favorite Web sites. They accessed each of them and briefly described the purpose of each site. Many were serious tools to improve the use of our computers and some were just for fun.