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From time to time I'll add announcements about my photography extensions on this page.

I've left my, now historical, thoughts on the past, present and future of printing and software below those.

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  1. Hi all

    This is just a quick message to explain why nothing has happened with my plugins over the last few months. 

    I caught Covid early in 2023, and then developed Long Covid. It’s been a bit of an up and down journey since, including a few fairly big crashes that seriously reduced my ability to do anything. 

    And then, last September, I caught Covid again. This time I found that I simply couldn’t do any coding. Doing anything on my computer took too much energy, and I couldn’t concentrate for long enough to do any useful programming. 

    As you can imagine, it’s been a bit frustrating. My third plugin is 90% done, and I’d got plans for v2 of TychBuilder. 

    But the good news is that I’ve been feeling a lot better over the last month or so. Not yet back to able to code, but (fingers crossed) getting there. 

    Wish me luck!

    Thanks

    Martin Bailey

  2. Photography requires a huge range of skills, whether you’re making pictures professionally or it’s your hobby. And those skills cover a broad range. There’s the obvious creative part, the understanding of composition, lighting, location etc. You need to know how to set your camera with the appropriate aperture, shutter speed etc and to focus in exactly the right place to achieve the desired depth of field and sharpness or to capture motion. And then, increasingly, you need to be computer-literate, so that you can bring the best out of the images that you’ve captured.

    Inevitably people vary and have strengths and weaknesses at different points on that spectrum. I know my weakness is in the creative end, for instance (I am a bit of a nerd, after all!)

    My new SlideMaker plugin, which has just been made available on the Adobe Creative Cloud marketplace, grew out of seeing the horror on fellow camera club members’ faces when told that they needed to submit images for club competitions as digital files, with a whole raft of requirements. There is usually a maximum width and a maximum height in pixels; the image often needs to be saved in sRGB; there may be a maximum file size; and there may be rules for setting the image title in metadata, for copyright text and for how the image file is named.

    While thinking about that I also realised that I was spending far too much time and effort on the simple, repetitive grunt work required to get from feeling I’d done all the processing I wanted to do on an image to having a file that I could share. And that was true regardless of whether I was thinking about a photographic competition, preparing for giving a slide show, delivering images for a digital photo frame or even just sharing them on social media.

    Yes, I could just do a quick export from Lightroom, but I want more control to adjust sharpening, to add a keyline (stroke) around the image, to pad extra space with black, to adjust metadata and the file name to export to …

    And that’s where the idea for SlideMaker came from. Set up a preset for any individual camera competition’s requirements, or for a photo frame, projector etc, or for the sizes that you’re happy putting on social media. Then, when you’ve done all the edits you planned, it can be one click to do all that grunt work; or a few more if you want manual control of how much sharpening should be applied and/or want to review or adjust the metadata handling for each image.

    You can even process all of the images that you have open in Photoshop in one go.

    I may regret offering this, but as a special launch offer until the end of April 2025 you can send me the competition entry rules for your camera club or other organisation. I’ll create a preset for you and send it back embedded in an image file so that you can extract it and save it for your own use. Send to info@bailey-online.org.

    SlideMaker page on this site: https://www.bailey-online.org/slidemaker

    And on the Adobe marketplace: https://exchange.adobe.com/apps/cc/a202d8cd/slidemaker