Category Archives: Corel
Corel digital photo editing products
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,
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Success! (which means it’s margarita time)
You might have noticed that I like to frame my pictures. To me, it simply adds to the picture.
Currently I’m using five programs to modify my pictures:
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Lightroom 4.2 — About the only thing I use this program for anymore is to take my RAW picture files and convert them into JPGs that are 1000 pixels on the longest side. “On the longest side” is the key phrase here because in every other program in which I’ve worked you cannot set the preference for the longest side. You can only choose horizontal side or vertical side. So if you have a mixture of landscape pictures and portrait pictures, you either have to make two passes through your files, or you have to accept that, choosing 1000 pixels for the horizontal side means that the longest side on the portrait pictures, the vertical side, will be much bigger than 1000 pixels. Ultimately all of the pictures I use in my blog posts are 600 pixels on the longest side. That pretty much means that if someone wants to borrow my pictures covertly, about the only thing they can do with them is use them on the computer. They won’t be worthy of printing because the resolution will be too low.
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CorelDRAW! X5 — I have been using CorelDRAW! since its inception. I can do virtually anything with this program, making it my go-to program if I need to do something quickly. CorelDRAW! X5 is where I do the postage stamps at the end of each post that feature Zoey the Cool Cat approving the post.
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Corel Photo-Paint X5 — This program comes with CorelDRAW! as its complementary photo-editing program. I have been using it for as many years as CorelDRAW! and pretty much know it inside and out. This is the program that I am most familiar with, so I don’t use it at all right now. I am forcing myself to use a different program because I am trying to become an expert at the other program.
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Corel PaintShop Pro X5 — This program is Corel’s answer to Adobe’s PhotoShop, and I have found that it is equally powerful and equally as difficult to use. Thus I don’t use it at all because PhotoShop is that other program that I am endeavouring to become an expert at.
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Adobe Photoshop CS6 — I bought the first version of Photoshop at the same time I bought the first version of CorelDRAW! That was a couple of decades ago I believe. At the time I needed both programs. However, when I moved to San Diego in April 1993, I had no further need for photo editing programs and quit upgrading them. When I went to upgrade my various programs in 2008, there was a significant difference between my Photoshop 8 and the new Photoshop CS3. I felt like I was in kindergarten again. Photoshop CS6 is where all my photo editing time is dedicated right now.
One of the tasks that I have been trying to learn in Photoshop is matting and framing a picture. Specifically I wanted to do it like they do it in photo galleries. Yesterday and this morning I spent a lot of time on the task and believe I have it down to a science now.
Here is the picture, unframed, that I will use:
I think you’ll agree that it needs some work. First I straightened the picture. Then I cloned out the little branches at the center riight and cloned a couple of other imperfections. After that, I cropped out the gray sky and that little piece sticking up off the roof at the upper right, and then gave it some extra contrast and sharpness. That gave me the following, a much better picture:
Of course, it still needs to be framed. Here it is with the frame that I’ve been using for the past several months:
That frame was created using an Action that I found somewhere on the Internet. Unfortunately, I don’t know how to edit Actions yet so that has been the essence of my ability to frame pictures in Photoshop CS6.
Yesterday I started working on learning how to do frames that are substantially more interesting. The culmination of my work gave me this:
Just like you would find at so many modern art galleries. I’m so happy! Magarita time!
I’m going to work on this some more with my ultimate goal being the creation of a tutorial for my readers so that you, too, can create interesting frames for your photographs!
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!
I lied (must mean I’m a Republican)
In a recent post of mine (Imperial Beach, the most southwesterly city in the continental U.S.), I lied! I was misleading to my readers. I’ll let you decide if I should be punished by having to vote for Romney & Ryan.
Pictures in my post:
Original, unaltered pictures:
I thought the original pictures were too cluttered so I tried to clean them up using Photoshop CS6. Cluttered….. Hmmm. Sounds just like politics, doesn’t it? What’s my punishment?
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!
Happy October!
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!
A special thanks….
Yesterday I found a blogger who was using my Friday Flower Fiesta logo in her blog. There was no attribution, and since I still use it in my blog, I asked her to remove it. She did, with an apology.
Actions like that cause me to go above and beyond. So, Ms Blogger, here is a Friday Flower Fiesta logo just for you to use as you wish in your blog or anywhere else. It’s yours:
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 can recommend Russel Ray — that’s me!
For those who think photoshopping is bad
When Borders went out of business last year, the first thing I did was take advantage of my employee discount to get some books that I didn’t need right then but that I thought I would find interesting sometime in the future.
One of those books was “Practical HDR,” by David Nightingale (ISBN 978-0-240-82122-1).
I have rarely liked any of the HDR pictures I’ve seen. They just seem way overdone for me. Of course, they are art, so I let the artist have his day in the sun. Who am I to diss someone else’s art?
Photoshop CS6 has a HDR function that I have looked at but not really used. The recently released Paintshop Pro X5 has a new HDR function, and since I just upgraded to PSP X5 and saw the news about its HDR, I thought I would get out the “Practical HDR” book and do some light reading.
On page 7 in the Introduction, is the following. I have not fact checked it.
“…the earliest photographers looked for different ways to record high contrast, or “high dynamic range” images. In the 1850s, Gustave Le Gray produced a number of dramatic seascapes constructed from two negatives — one exposed for the sea, the other for the sky. He cut both negatives along the horizon, then used the two parts to create a single photographic print. In this way he was able to capture all of the detail in the scene, which would have been impossible with a single exposure. Motivated by the same problem, Charles Wyckoff developed a wide dynamic range film composed of three layers, each of which had a different sensitivity to light. He used this to produce photographs of nuclear explosions, which first appeared on the cover of Life magaine in the 1940s.”
I’m sure just about all of us have heard the fairly recent news about how the venerable Ansel Adams created his great pictures with dodging and burning, multiple exposures, and the like. His pictures didn’t just come out of the camera like that!
So why not recognize that, as my wise old grandmother said, “What comes out of the camera is just the basics to start with,” and use everything at our disposal to create the best pictures possible, or at least something that we consider art?
I was playing around with some “bad” pictures — i.e., underexposed and overexposed — and wondered what I might be able to obtain by merging them using the HDR functions in the two programs. Here is my most interesting art of a lone tree during sunrise at the top of Mount Helix in La Mesa, California:
I decided I liked that because of the ethereal, out-of-focus nature of everything except the center of the photograph. This resulted because the two pictures I used were handheld and slightly different in what I had focused on, exposure settings, and even the focal length of the lens. One picture was 57mm and the other was 55mm. Thus the two programs could not align them exactly.
Here are the two bad pictures I used:
With the many controls available in digital photo editing programs, even the two bad pictures could be cleaned up and made into very good pictures — especially if the file is a RAW file instead of a JPG file — using such things as exposure, contrast, brightness, highlights, shadows, etc. For example, here are the same two bad pictures cleaned up some:
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!
Friday Flower Fiesta (September 14, 2012)
In last week’s Friday Flower Fiesta, one of my pictures was a stapelia flower on a black background. It was my favorite picture from last week. The original picture was one of those throwaway pictures — bad composition, bad exposure, poor focus.
I can never convince myself to throw any picture away, though, because I have Adobe Photoshop CS6, Corel PaintShop Pro X5 (just came out a couple of days ago; I upgraded within minutes), Corel Photo-Paint X6, and CorelDRAW! X6.
This week’s flower pictures are a bunch of throwaways that I dug out of the trash folder.
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 can recommend Russel Ray — that’s me!
Leftovers welcome
Yesterday evening I went for a walk at Shoreline Park over on Shelter Island:
I had driven on Shelter Island before but had never stopped to explore. It’s definitely worth exploring for a few hours. I got closer to more pelicans than at any time in my life, and that encompasses 57 years,
5 months, 27 days, 0 hours, and 44 minutes at the time I dictated that. Definitely my new go-to place for pelican watching.
I used CorelDRAW! X6 to create the following painting and titled it Leftovers Welcome.
Here is the original 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!
The Goose Lady of Lake Murray
I go for a walk or bike ride each day as a way to force me to get out from behind the computer. One of the places that I enjoy going is Lake Murray, which is part of the huge Mission Trails Regional Park:
It’s a very popular place for walkers, bikers, fisherpeople, boaters, birders, readers, thinkers, and sitters. Whenever I go around 6:00 a.m., it never fails that I see a lady feeding the geese. I call her “The Goose Lady.”
She and I were the only two there this morning, and I watched her interact with the birds, all of which have names. As best I could tell, they even know their names.
That’s the kind of picture that I like to play around with to create something artistic, so I created my “paint by number” painting and a line art picture using Photoshop and CorelDRAW!, respectively.
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!
Frame those birds, baby, frame those birds
I like to frame my pictures but the framing function (border) at WordPress is lacking, at best.
I used to use Corel PaintShop Pro X4 and CorelDRAW! X6 to do frames. In fact, Zoey the Cool Cat’s stamp of approval in each post is done in CorelDRAW! X6.
My focus over the past few months has been on Adobe Photoshop CS6, so I was extremely happy recently to find the various framing functions. Many of the frames can be done with Actions, or you can do your own frame and set up your own Action. Actions are macros, or scripts, that allow you to do the same thing over and over again, very quickly.
Following are some recent pictures of birds at the San Diego Zoo Safari Park which were framed in Photoshop CS6.
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!
