Category Archives: Adobe
Adobe digital photo editing products
Major disadvantage of living in San Diego: Sunshine
There aren’t too many problems caused by living in San Diego. The cost of living is higher than many areas of the country…. State taxes are higher…. My income is higher, too, though. It’s a trade off, one I can live with.
There is an occasional earthquake but not nearly as many big earthquakes — 1 in 20 years — as the hurricanes and tropical storms that I went through in Texas — Beulah 1967, Candy 1968, Celia 1970, Fern 1971, Allen 1980, Alicia 1983. Those are just the ones that I personally went through; immediate family was affected by many more hurricanes, the most recent of which was Katrina in New Orleans. A niece and a sister both lost their homes to Katrina, and another sister had four feet of water in her home, only because she and her husband had built their home on a ten foot platform. Theirs was the only home left in their Slidell neighborhood; all the others were washed away. My birth mom, having lived in New Orleans for 35 years, evacuated to Utah before Katrina and never went back to Louisiana. She died in Utah in February 2012.
Interestingly, San Diego is only three degrees farther north than New Orleans, meaning that the Pacific hurricanes could impact us here. However, the Pacific Ocean waters near California tend to be rather cold, causing Pacific hurricanes to dissipate over Baja California as they move north. San Diego did get hit by one hurricane during the past 200 years: the 1858 San Diego Hurricane. Two other hurricanes brought wind and rain: the 1939 California tropical storm and Hurricane Kathleen in 1976.
About the only disadvantage of living in San Diego that I can think of right now is the constant sunshine. It causes havoc with our roofs, drying them out and shrinking them so that when the six weeks of rain come in December and January, many roofs leak.
The other problem that personally affects me is that pictures of San Diego can be rather plain and ordinary with the two types of skies that we typically have: blue and overcast gray. Outside of the December/January rainy season, overcast skies hits us in May and June. We call it May Gray and June Gloom.
One of the things that I’m working on in Photoshop, Lightroom, Photo-Paint, and PaintShop Pro is finding the easiest way to replace dull, boring, and uninteresting skies with something more interesting. For example, here is a recent picture of Angel Stadium of Anaheim:
In and of itself, it’s simply a documentary picture of the stadium and parking lot where the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim (formerly the California Angels) play major league baseball. Pretty drab. Dull, boring, and uninteresting. I thought it would be a good picture to try out different skies and different methods of replacing skies. Here’s my favorite from my many attempts, this one done in Photoshop CS6:
Aaaaaaaaaaaah. Looks much better.
When I find the best method that works consistently well with many different types of pictures, I’ll put together a tutorial, have no fear.
Looking for real estate services in San Diego County?
I can highly recommend
James Frimmer, Realtor
Century 21 Award, DRE #01458572
If you’re looking for a home inspector,
I recommend Russel Ray — that’s me!
When Photoshop Photomerge goes wrong
When I was up in Los Angeles for National Train Day on May 11, I made a trip to the Capitol Records Building in Hollywood. The last time I was there was in 1978. At that time the building had a huge lobby full of gold records, most notably those from The Beatles and The Beach Boys.
I took many pictures, and twenty years later when digital cameras, scanners, and editing software came along, I scanned them. Sadly, I lost all of them in the Great Hard Drive Crash of August 2005. I was hoping to recapture those pictures.
The building was closed on May 11 (Sunday), and looking in the front entrance glass doors indicated that there no longer is a huge lobby. It’s now like most skyscrapers with an unattended lobby with a directory and elevators. No gold records to be seen anywhere. I satisfied myself with pictures of the building.
Since traffic in Hollywood is heavy, getting into the street to take one picture of a tall building wasn’t feasible. Pictures from the other side of the street were full of utility poles and wires. I decided to pick a spot without junk in the picture and take five or six pictures of sections of the building, my intent being to have Photoshop CS6 do a photomerge when I got back home.
Here is what the photomerge gave me:
I think you will agree with me that the first try at photomerge could be considered photomerge gone wrong.
In looking at the six pictures, I saw that Photomerge was trying to merge two lower pictures that looked rather normal with four upper pictures that had that dastardly tall building retreating perspective the farther up the buildng you got.
My solution was to merge the first two pictures, then merge the next two pictures, then merge the last two pictures. That left me with three pictures. Since the top two were more alike than the bottom two, I merged them, leaving me now with two pictures. A final merge of the two semifinal merges gave me this:
Much better.
Leads me to believe that the fewer pictures you force Photomerge to use, the better the resulting picture will be. Thus, if you have lots of pictures in your Photomerge, merge them two by two until you arrive at the final two-picture merge. If you started with ten pictures, your flow chart to the final merge would look like this.
Looking for real estate services in San Diego County?
I can highly recommend
James Frimmer, Realtor
Century 21 Award, DRE #01458572
If you’re looking for a home inspector,
I recommend Russel Ray — that’s me!
Creating an orb in Photoshop
I use Photoshop CS6 for most of my photo editing work — adding contrast, sharpening, correcting exposure, bringing back highlights, cropping, and so much more.
Once I finish editing, though, it’s fun to find out what other things Photoshop can do.
To me, Photoshop filters are the most fun, and recently I learned how to create an interesting orb, like this:
Not everything makes a good orb. The more little things in the picture, the better looking the orb will be.
Here’s how to do it, step by step.
Open your picture and crop it to a square, or a ratio of 1:1. Click on the crop icon. In your crop options bar, it probably says “Ratio.” Click on that and change it to 1:1 (Square). Your crop marks will move to the center of the image to create a square from your picture. You can move the crop area around if you want it somewhere else. (Click on the image below for a larger image.)
Next, click on Filter ► Distort ► Polar Coordinates…. ► Polar to Rectangular ► Okay
My flower now looks like this:
That creates an interesting item in and of itself, but we’re going to go further.
Now click on Image ► Image Rotation ► Flip Canvas Vertical. That gives me this:
Again, you could stop there and have something interesting. We’re still going further, though!
Click on Filter ► Distort ► Polar Coordinates…. ► Rectangular to Polar ► Okay.
That gives you an orb!
If you don’t crop your picture to a square, you won’t get an orb. Instead, if your picture is wider than it is tall, you’ll get an oval on its side. If your picture is taller than it is wide, you’ll get an oval on end.
Have fun!
Lastly, guess who is in this orb?
I’m Zoey the Cool Cat,
and I would approve this post
if I wasn’t dreaming of catching birds.
Looking for real estate services in San Diego County?
I can highly recommend
James Frimmer, Realtor
Century 21 Award, DRE #01458572
If you’re looking for a home inspector,
I recommend Russel Ray — that’s me!
There’s that guy again!
Looking for real estate services in San Diego County?
I can highly recommend
James Frimmer, Realtor
Century 21 Award, DRE #01458572
If you’re looking for a home inspector,
I recommend Russel Ray — that’s me!
And the birthday is only half over!
So it’s been a great birthday so far. First the roofing company showed up at 7:00 (yes, A.M.) to replace the roof.
Zoey the Cool Cat is not too pleased with all the people walking on the roof, pounding, debris raining down from above scaring her mourning doves away……
Then Jim and I left the little queen all alone while we went out to Cleveland National Forest to see the snow.
As soon as we get back, we have a 5.2 earthquake. Nothing significant as far as we Californians are concerned….
There wasn’t as much snow in the mountains as I was led to believe but I got a few good pictures of which this one is my favorite:
It looks so serene, quite, peaceful, restful…. I’ll leave it for you to come up with some more synonyms. It was cold, however. How people actually live in areas where there is snow on the ground for half the year is beyond my comprehension.
I decided to take the picture to Photoshop and create some different pictures with different frames:
Looking for real estate services in San Diego County?
I can highly recommend
James Frimmer, Realtor
Century 21 Award, DRE #01458572
If you’re looking for a home inspector,
I recommend Russel Ray — that’s me!
Talk bubbles in Adobe Photoshop CS6
For the past couple of decades I have been doing my photography editing and graphics work in Corel programs. Currently I’m using DRAW! X6, PaintShop Pro X5, and Photo-Paint X6. Give me a graphics or photo project and I can do it in those three programs.
Since around this time last year, I set out on a mission to learn Adobe Photoshop. In addition to the Corel programs, I had used Photoshop and PageMaker in the ’80s and ’90s because of my work. When my work no longer required them in 1994, I quit using them and quit upgrading them.
I know that the current version of Photoshop, CS6, can do everything that the three Corel programs can do, but the masses say that the learning curve is pretty steep. I’m here to tell you that the learning curve is, indeed, steep. But it sure is fun!
Today I’ve been learning to do callouts and talk bubbles in Photoshop CS6. The process is intuitive, but because things show up on different layers, getting things to come together, especially if you just want to edit text or change a graphic, can be frustrating. Once you learn how things work, though, it becomes much easier.
Here is a picture that I added two talk bubbles to.
It took me about an hour (and a couple of margaritas, a plate of nachos, a BLT sandwich, and a beer) to do that. However, once I understood how things worked, it took just a couple of minutes to do it again on a different picture.
Looking for real estate services in San Diego County?
I can highly recommend
James Frimmer, Realtor
Century 21 Award, DRE #01458572
If you’re looking for a home inspector,
I recommend Russel Ray — that’s me!
Look this way! Please look this way!
On a recent hike in the San Diego National Wildlife Refuge, I found three house finches sitting on a wire. I took five pictures before they flew away. My intent was to get all three of them looking at me, or at least looking forward. They refused to cooperate. There was always at least one bird that was looking the other way. Begging all three birds to “look this way, please, look this way!” didn’t have any effect on them.
I got up the courage to do something about it as I was looking at the five pictures this morning. Originally, I was going to simply replace the one bird that wasn’t looking at me with one that was. Then I thought, why stop at three birds? After playing around, I came up with a nice picture of six house finches:
Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to tell me which three birds originally were not in that picture. Let us number the birds 1 through 6 from bottom left to top right. And as all good teachers would do, I require that you “show your work,” i.e., explain your decision.
This little exercise reminds me of my wise old grandmother. She carried her Kodak Instamatic camera in her purse everywhere she went, and she didn’t hesitate to pull it out and snap a picture. Once she got home she took all her pictures and mounted them in her scrapbooks and photo albums. However, she didn’t hesitate to crop them, cut them in two, whatever, in order to make the pictures better or make them fit the theme of her pages.
She used to always tell me, “What comes out of the camera is just the basics to start with.” It’s still like that, so if you aren’t using Photoshop, Photoshop Elements, Lightroom, Serif PhotoPlus, Photo Studio, PaintShop Pro, Photo-Paint, ACDSee, Gimp, Picmonkey, etc., you’re missing out on a lot of fun. The ones I use are Photoshop CS6, Lightroom 4, Photo-Paint X6, and PaintShop Pro X5.
Looking for real estate services in San Diego County?
I can highly recommend
James Frimmer, Realtor
Century 21 Award, DRE #01458572
If you’re looking for a home inspector,
I recommend Russel Ray — that’s me!
And you’ll have fun fun fun until daddy takes your filters away
Photoshop CS6 has lots of ways to modify pictures, but some of the most fun are filters. Many filters come with the program, but if you’re not satisfied with all of them, there are billions and billions and billions of third-party filters available, some free, some inexpensive, and some expensive.
One of the third-party filters that I bought is Fractalius by Redfield. It cost $39.90, which I consider to be on the expensive side for a Photoshop filter. Redfield is a Russian company, which might explain why the filter is now available via instant download and required a PayPal complaint to get my download code. Nonetheless, I am extremely happy with the filter.
Recently I was out in a field of grasses and snapped this photo:
The bright, sunny day caused the grasses to be somewhat washed out, but since I shoot RAW files, I was able to recover some color and contrast:
Still not being satisfied, I took the second picture and applied the Redfield Fractalius filter to it. Here are some of the results:
Each picture took about five seconds to create and save, and there literally are millions of possibilities. It’s a lot of fun!
Looking for real estate services in San Diego County?
I can highly recommend
James Frimmer, Realtor
Century 21 Award, DRE #01458572
If you’re looking for a home inspector,
I recommend Russel Ray — that’s me!
End of the world postponed, so it’s off to the San Diego Zoo!
I was successful at getting the Mayans to postpone the end of the world to 3012. Of course, just like the government, that means I kicked the problem down the road. We’ll let our great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great grandchildren deal with it.
Meanwhile, enjoy some more pictures of wildlife that make the San Diego Zoo their home. I hope I’m not boring you with San Diego Zoo pictures. If I am, well, bear with me; it’s my favorite place to go to get away from it all and relax for a couple of hours.
I’m not sure I would want to run around all my life with three-foot spikes sticking out of my head, but maybe next Halloween I’ll try it.
Several decades ago I worked as a copywriter/editor/proofer for the University Press, the College of Science, and the Department of Chemistry at Texas A&M University. That’s when I overcame my fear of the possessive S, as in Ross’s Goose above.
There are a couple of general rules that you can follow which are good in 99% of the cases. First, if you pronounce the possessive S, then use the apostrophe S. Since I pronounce Ross’s as Ross-es, I spell it with the apostrophe S. A couple of well-known exceptions are Jesus and Texas. Even though you pronounce the possessive S, you don’t use the S after the apostrophe (Jesus’, not Jesus’s, and Texas’, not Texas’s).
Another exception is that you don’t use the ending S if the following word begins with an S. For example, if that were Ross’ Snow Goose, the S that would normally be after the apostrophe gets left off. Too many Ses (S’s?) in a row would make you think of, what? A snake.
Mr. Ring-necked Duck looks like he has a little attitude. I promised him that none of my blog readers would make fun of him, so be sure to LIKE him.
These next two birds might not actually make their homes at the San Diego Zoo because they are free to come and go, visiting the wonderful San Diego area at will. However, if you could make your home at the San Diego Zoo, where you would get regular feedings and have people oooh and aaah over you, well, wouldn’t you?………:)
I’ve always known the Great Egret by that name but recently I read a blog from a blogger in Florida who called it a Great White Heron, which is also one of its common names.
The Visayan Warty Pig is a juvenile, so it does not have a single wart yet.
Once you see an adult, you’ll truly believe that there are faces that only a mother could love.
Here, let me show you one:
The hippopotamus is a young one, born on January 26, 2011, which happens to be my wise old grandmother‘s birthday. She would have been exactly 100 years old, so I have a special fondness for that little hippo.
Looking for real estate services in San Diego County?
I can highly recommend
James Frimmer, Realtor
Century 21 Award, DRE #01458572
If you’re looking for a home inspector,
I recommend Russel Ray — that’s me!
My effected brown pelican
Yesterday while I was playing around with frames in Photoshop (see my post Using Photoshop CS6 to frame your pictures), I accidentally hit a keyboard shortcut which applied an effect to a picture to which I had already applied a different effect.
This is something that I had not thought about, applying effect upon effect upon effect, ad nauseum.
I’ve always done just one effect and went on my merry little way.
When I finished, I saved what I had created:
P.S. Anyone notice how difficult it is to upload pictures to our blogs after the WordPress changes made late yesterday?
Looking for real estate services in San Diego County?
I can highly recommend
James Frimmer, Realtor
Century 21 Award, DRE #01458572
If you’re looking for a home inspector,
I recommend Russel Ray — that’s me!
