Computer Info – January 26, 2000

This Week’s Program

        This week – An introduction to layers, resizing a picture to fit on a new page with many other photos, why save it as a PSD (PhotoShop file) or JPG file. We will be making use of what we learned last week about navigating between multiple open documents and how to locate our files.

Files (Part 2) – Folders (or Directories) ???

Practice Lesson 1 (finding the drive that your file is on) -----
            Open WORDPAD -- then from the FILE menu – choose OPEN.
            Click on the small folder icon to the right of the LOOK IN box until it shows you all of your drive choices.
            When all of your drives are listed ---
                    MY COMPUTER will be listed in the white box to the right of the words LOOK IN.

After we have located the drive that your file is on, we have to locate the folder (or directory) where the file is located.
Practice Lesson 2  (locating the folder)  ----
            Now choose the drive that your file is on (by double-clicking on that drive).
            Let’s assume that it is on your hard drive (C:\)
            Look for the yellow folder named MY DOCUMENTS
                    – double click on it to open it.

PhotoShop 5.0 Limited Edition

        This program is a photo editing program that is being shipped with some of the HP scanners and maybe other brands.
Layers
        To view the layers
                WINDOWS – SHOW LAYERS
Multiple Pictures Open
        To see the list of open pictures in order to work on the one you want
                WINDOWS
Scale or resize a portion of your picture
        In order to resize a portion of your picture, you have to select the portion that you want
                FROM THE TOOLS – CHOOSE THE MARQUEE TOOL
        then draw a box around the area you want.
                FROM THE EDIT MENU – CHOOSE TRANSFORM – SCALE
        this will place handles on your selection box.
                HOLD DOWN THE SHIFT KEY WHILE DRAGGING FROM A CORNER
        this will let you resize the area. If you don’t hold down the shift key,
        you will distort the image – the same applies to using the handles on the
        sides or top or bottom – you will distort the image.
Save your picture that has layers as a PSD or JPG?
        If you have added any layers to your picture by pasting something on it or adding text, then when you do a SAVE AS – your only choice will be to save it as a PSD. If you wish to save it as a JPG, you must choose to save it under the SAVE A COPY menu item.
        Why choose to save it as a PSD versus a JPG? When you save it as a PSD, you can bring it back into PhotoShop and still manipulate the layers. Once you have saved it as a JPG, all of the layers have been merged into one.
        You do not want to send anyone via email the PSD version – unless you know that they have PhotoShop and wish to edit the picture. The file size of the PSD version is many, many times larger than the JPG version – and many people can not view (or open) the picture when it is in the PSD format.

Interesting Web Sites

Here is a web page to print and then see if everyone can see the same image.
                     http://www.trinityumc.net/youth/cool.htm
A good woodworking page
                    http://www.augusthome.com/woodworking/woodtips/index.htm
From the television show on home improvements
                  http://www.michaelholigan.com
On this web page, you can enter a surname (last name) and a time frame and you will get a map of the United States showing the distribution of people with that surname within the 50 United States. This map is often helpful when trying to determine a starting point for genealogy projects.
                  http://www.hamrick.com/names

DSL (Digital Subscriber Line)

        A couple of people have made us aware of this new type of free Internet service. We have no knowledge of it, so will not make any comments about it. But this will at least let you know about new concepts in the computer field.
        Launching in April of 2000, FreeDSL, from Broadband Digital Group is a new Internet service that provides consumers with free high-speed access to the Internet, utilizing Digital Subscriber Line (DSL) technology, while offering advertisers and marketers a highly effective way to target those users.
        They offer their users free high-speed Internet access over their regular phone lines, as well as free e-mail and browser assistant tools, through their partnership with Winfire, developer of the Personalized Browser AssistantTM.
                  http://www.FreeDSL.com/

Memory on Graphics Cards

        Common forms of memory in today’s graphic cards are
            SDRAM -- SGRAM -- VRAM
        High-end cards for some systems may also feature CDRAM or 3DRAM . If you are running graphics-intensive programs, faster memory will give your system a boost.
SDRAM -- Synchronous Dynamic Random-Access Memory. It speeds things up by creating twin buffers so that one can be read from as the other is being written to.
SGRAM -- Synchronous Graphics Random-Access Memory. It is similar to SDRAM but has the added ability to speed up rendering of 3-D graphics.
VRAM -- Video Random-Access Memory uses a technique called Dual Porting. Dual Porting allows memory to be written to and read from simultaneously. It is fast but more expensive than SDRAM and SGRAM.
CDRAM or 3DRAM -- These are high-end memory systems that speed up complex 3-D graphics rendering. You will find them primarily on the most expensive graphics cards.

Graphics Accelerator Cards and AGP

        A graphics accelerator card is a graphics cards with a video coprocessor on it. Almost all new graphics cards today are accelerator cards. The people who see the greatest benefit are serious computer game players with a desire for better 3-D graphics and faster performance and users of high-end graphics applications. Web surfers are also likely to see an increase in speed, because images will now load more quickly.
        What is the difference between AGP and AGP 2X? ACP 2X is an improvement on the AGP architecture – the earlier AGP buses worked at twice the speed of a PCI bus and now AGP 2X works at double that speed. There is already talk of AGP 4X which would again double that speed.