Highlights Newsletter February 2021

President's Palette

"Hello. My name is Sherry and I am a techno-phobe."

Yup, that’s me. I have a bit of trepidation about manipulating all the photos I take, in fear that I might ruin them and they would be lost forever into the vapor of the "digital cloud." What is crazy about this is that I should know better. As a mass spectrometrist at Hopkins Med for almost 20 years, I did research using my "Baby", a $1M+ instrument that was the size of a small room, was totally computer controlled, and bombarded molecules apart with high voltage in order to identify them. Go figure! The amazing thing is that I am not alone. We have found that it isn’t just "newbies" and "techno-phobes," like myself, who need help with this process. According to Sharon Green, at least 50% of all images submitted to the Mid-Atlantic Exhibition in past years needed some kind of "emergency care" or correction (whether it be image naming, file resizing, cropping debris from edges, etc.) before they could be forwarded on to our Jurors for selection! Most of the time she did it without ever contacting the artist involved and April Rimpo has done the same for images submitted to our Signature and Associate exhibits.

But there is now hope for us All! You see, Bob Coe, our Webmaster, and April, our Wild Apricot Guru, have taken pity upon folks like me (and many of you – we know who you are) and come to our rescue. They have installed in the reorganized "Member Resources" section of our BWS Wild Apricot website, under the heading "Photo Editing Tools or Videos," two tools to help even "techno-phobes" like us prepare images for Signature Artist Jurying, Signature or Associate Artist Exhibits, or for the Mid-Atlantic Regional Exhibition.

The first feature is an internet link to a YouTube video from Touch Technology Review: "Photo Editing Tips for Your iPhone – Make your Photos and Videos Look Better." It provides information on everything you need in order to produce an acceptable image of your painting for submission using an iPhone! The video shows you the power of the little "Edit" command in the Photo app on your iPhone. Located at the upper right corner above your photo, "Edit" enables cropping and fixing the perspective if the photo you have taken of your painting is "cockeyed." The video also explains how to adjust your image if the colors, sharpness or contrast in your photo don’t exactly match that of your painting. (No "juicing up" the colors, though, that’s frowned upon!) You can even straighten your image if your painting was tilted back when you photographed it! (P.S. this distortion is called the keystone effect and it happens mainly when your camera is tilted. Knowing how to correct this also helps you achieve the proper perspective in your original photo reference, especially of architectural subjects, prior to ever starting your drawing.) The app won’t help you remove the glare on glass but you should never photograph your painting behind glass in a frame anyway, as the glass will distort and mute your image! Two more excellent features of the app are that it can turn your color photo into a black and white image so that you can easily view the value scale therein, and it can even correct the abnormal tint of a photo that was taken incorrectly in florescent light, not natural. That little "Edit" button is a "Jack of almost all trades" and I have only explored some of its many talents at this point.

The only thing that the Photos app on your iPhone won’t do (other than name your watercolor) is to re-size your image to the correct dimensions/pixel count and resolution for submission to an exhibit. So…..the second editing tool is an app in the iPhone App Store titled Image Size by Vitalij Schaefer which allows you to re-size your final image to defined specifications. It is very popular and is even recommended by "Business Insider" website as the top app for re-sizing photographs. The app is free to use these basic features, with occasional pop up ads. If you use it often, you may wish to purchase the ad-free version, but it's up to you. Like with your Photo app, simple instructions for the Image Size app are available online through a tutorial, this time by Business Insider. This app also allows you to rename your image with a proper file name, create and then store it in a special file for your "Painting Images" and finally send it off to an exhibit. For those who can’t stand the ads and still want a free app – "befunky.com" is an app also mentioned by other sources, but I haven’t tried it.

For those of you with Android devices, all of these processes can be done by using the Photoshop Express App right on your phone.

I haven’t mastered any of these techniques yet, but I’m experimenting and hopefully I will soon be able to submit images that would pass Sharon’s inspection. It is actually imperative that we all do this, since in just the last 10 months, the Covid virus has helped to accelerate the digital revolution – gone are boxes of processed slides, no images are copied on CDs or DVDs, now Dropbox and Zoom, no touch – everything is now directly uploaded to the internet. Technology will never return to pre-Covid conditions, even when we have mainly in-person events once again. You might have noticed that BWS and almost all watercolor organizations now ask for a digital image of your painting when you register for any exhibit event (whether digital or in-person). These images are important for online catalogs and publicity.

In addition to exhibit changes, our Signature Artist Jurying is now being done using only submitted digital images. This is really an advantage for everyone, since we have found that the Jurying is actually better, more confident, and more consistent when the jurors have sufficient quiet time to carefully study each of the paintings (from an increased number of applicants), make their individual decisions, and only then come together via Zoom for voting and discussion. In all these instances there isn’t a Sharon or April or Stacy to fix images of our paintings so that they won’t be rejected. To keep up, artists must learn the digital technology and skills necessary to remain competitive and be able to produce digital images that replicate their spectacular, well-executed watercolor paintings well enough to get into the shows or achieve BWS Signature Artist membership.

So please join me in my "skill-seeking." Help change that old adage from "You can’t teach an old dog new tricks!" to "Oh, yes we can do that. Easily!"

Sherry

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