Our
June 7th meeting was our first with a vendor demonstration since we
affiliated
with WOCMUG last July. We had 2 excellent vendors represented at the
meeting, Corel Inc represented by Martina Ryan and Wacom represented
by Michelle
Lindsey. Although both companies make products for both Macs and PCs,
both presentations featured the Mac platform. Both representatives
arrived
together and set up their presentations on their own Powerbooks (Lynn
Goodrich and I arrived early and had the club's G4 all set up if they
had wanted to use it). Michelle showed her Wacom tablets first and demonstrated
how Wacom tablets make Painter 6 extra powerful. She described the
features
and their implementation as she went through her presentation. She showed
a lot of her favorite features of Painter including textures, the
interactivity
of pressure and the different tools, the use of the erasure with her
tablets, and different programing tips for extra productivity with
the Wacom tablets.
Michelle also described the differences between their Graphire and Intuos
line of tablets. Michelle also passed along a really great user group
offer that expired on June 29th for Intuos Tablets.
Martina Ryan of Corel was next up as a presenter. She went further in
depth on the features of Painter 6. She showed how to set up brushes,
patterns, scripts, custom pallets of favorite tools, layers, as well as
techniques to maximize your productivity with Painter 6. While still in
the Painter demo, she showed off her favorite KPT 6 features which Corel
also purchased from MetaCreations. She then went on to demonstrate KnockOut
1.5 which is a masking tool for making difficult selections in Photoshop.
She demonstrated with a furry bear on a similarly colored background and
Knockout did an amazing job of making the difficult selection. Martina
finished her demonstration with Bryce 4. It is a very impressive program
for making 3-d scenes. She showed how to construct a scene and how to
add textures and water and sky effects with the program. She showed several
completed projects that demonstrated the abilities of Bryce. Martina also
announced that Corel is very committed to Mac OS X and are planning to
launch Mac OS X optimized applications: Bryce 5, Corel Painter 7, CorelDRAW
10, Corel KnockOut 2 and KPT 7, this summer and fall. Martina had special
User Group pricing for the night of the presentation on Corel products
that was extremely reasonable. That offer also was only good for dues
paying members of WOCMUG.
We had an excellent raffle at the meeting that netted $127 to the WOCMUG
treasury. We also had 4 members join WOCMUG at the meeting. Raffle prizes
were: Donated by Corel, a full version of Painter 6 was won by Carroll
Jones. Donated by Wacom was 3 Scott Kelby Videos on Photoshop and Wacom
tablets that were won by Carroll Jones, Ron Cable and Ben Allen. Donated
by CE Software was QuickKeys 5.0 won by Ben Allen, QuickKeys Plug ins
won by Carroll D. Vault and a QuickKeys T-shirt won by Chela Cowden.
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