Category Archives: How I Did It
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?
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James Frimmer, Realtor
Century 21 Award, DRE #01458572
If you’re looking for a home inspector,
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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!
Using Photoshop CS6 to frame your pictures
Here is the simplest way I have found to use Photoshop CS6 to frame your pictures.
Decide which picture to frame. This might be the hardest step. 
I’ll use a picture of Zoey the Cool Cat waiting for Santa Claus to deliver a mourning dove under the Christmas tree:
Do all of your photo editing work before framing. Your final picture is the one you want to frame. So that you can keep up with me here, resize your picture to 600 pixels on the longest side, the horizontal side. You can do that many ways, but I’ll show you how to do it here using Photoshop CS6.
Click on Image ► Image Size. In the Width box, type 600, hit tab, and make sure the box now highlighted in blue reads Pixels. If it doesn’t, click on the down arrow and choose Pixels. Then hit Enter or click on OK.
Now that we have a 600-pixels-wide picture, we’re set to go. I wanted you to use the Image ► Image Size command because right below it is the command that controls our framing, the Image ► Canvas Size command. If your picture is small on your screen, hold the Control key down and hit zero on your number keypad; do not use the top row of numbers (If it doesn’t resize your picture, make sure your number lock key is on and try again).
Let’s put a thin white border around our picture. I always use a thin light-colored border, either white or gray, to separate the picture from the thicker colored border that we’re going to create and which adds that certain pizzazz to the framing, just like at the framing shop.
Click on Image ► Canvas Size. That gives you this window:
In the Width box, change 600 to 610. Make sure the box next to that says Pixels. Since we want an even border around the picture, change the 399 to 409 and make sure the box next to that also says Pixels. Change Canvas extension color to White:
Now you should have a white border around your picture. I used WordPress to put a black border around my white-bordered picture here so that you could see the white border:
Now let’s put in our colored border. Again, click on Image ► Canvas Size. Let’s make it a 50 pixel colored border. Change 610 to 660 in the Width box, and change 409 to 459 in the Height box. Click on the down arrow in the Canvas extension color box and choose Other. That brings up the Color Picker (Canvas Extension Color) box.
Here’s where you can really have some fun. You can choose any color by using the color box, the color strip, or HTML number codes for any color imaginable. However, what I like to do is pick a color from my picture. The way to do that is simply to move your cursor out of the Color picker window and over your picture. Notice that your cursor turns into an eyedropper. Click your eyedropper anywhere on your picture and you’ll see that the color you clicked on magically appears in the Color Picker window. Everything you ever wanted to know about the color you clicked on is now in the Color Picker window:
Click on OK, and then click OK again. Hold the Control key down and hit zero on your number keypad to resize the picture to fit on your screen. Here’s my picture:
Now let’s add our final border, a white border, to separate the purple mat from our final frame, which will be black.
Click on Image ► Canvas Size and change the Width box to 760 and the Height box to 559. Change the Canvas extension color to White. Click on OK. Hit Control and zero on the keypad to resize your picture to fit on the screen. I’ve used WordPress again to put a thin black border around my picture so you could see the white border we just added.
Now we’re going to add an extension just to the bottom so we can add a title and our company logo.
Click on Image ► Canvas Size again. Do not change the width. Instead, change the height to 659 pixels. Now we need to anchor that 100 pixels to the bottom of the canvass. In the Anchor box with all the arrows….
….click on the top center arrow. What that means is that you want to anchor your picture in the top center, forcing your new 100-pixels canvas extension to go to the bottom center. Your Canvas Size box should look like this:
Click on OK. Your picture should look like the following (I again used the WordPress function to put a thin black line around my picture here).
Our last border will be black, to act as a black frame around the picture and the white and purple mat frames.
Click on Image ► Canvas Size and change the Width from 760 to 810, and the Height from 659 to 709. Change the Canvas extension color to Black:
Lastly, add text and your company logo.
If you don’t know how to add text and your logo, let me know in a comment. If there is enough demand, I’ll do a tutorial on that. If you have any problems, also let me know in a comment. Meanwhile, happy framing!
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!
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!
It’s all in the eyes!
When I joined the seventh grade debate team, my wise old grandmother told me to look. “Look at your opponent, look at the moderator, look at the audience. It’s all in the eyes!” she said. She was right.
Obama lost the first presidential debate because he did not look at Romney, did not look at the moderator, did not look at the audience, did not look at the camera. He looked down, almost as if he were sleeping, disinterested, maybe even hanging his head in shame.
In the vice-presidential debate, Ryan (some of my friends call him “Lyin’ Ryan”) did much of the same thing. He drank so much that I thought he was drinking margaritas because I’m pretty sure mere water wouldn’t be worth a drink every five seconds. He spent a lot of time taking notes. For what? It’s not like there would be a test afterwards, and surely his memory could remember something said 30 seconds earlier. When he did look at Biden, he had this weird smirk on his face. And that Eddie Munster hairline doesn’t help matters any……….
Republicans say Biden was rude by interrupting. Better to interrupt those lies rather than let them be spouted out as fact! (Go Joe!) Joe even looked directly at the camera several times, saying, “Folks, listen to me….” or “Folks, here are the facts…..” or “Folks, who do you trust here?” That’s another area where Obama failed. He let Romney spout all those lies as if they were fact, and unfortunately the public believed them. That’s why it’s important to interrupt those lies.
Now on to serious things.
When I was at a photographic art exhibit a couple of months ago, I had the pleasure of talking with the photographer. His work was of flowers and birds. I learned from him how to get my pictures of red and yellow flowers to be more realistic than what my camera was giving me (remember that my wise old grandmother also said “What comes out of the camera is just the basics to start with.”). I also learned from him why I liked his bird pictures so much. It’s all in the eyes!
To wit, here is a picture of a monkey at the San Diego Zoo:
It’s a good picture but I wanted something a little more from it. After realizing that a lot of that monkey’s emotions is in the eyes, I knew what had to be done. I needed to photoshop those eyes so you could see what’s in them:
Subtle, yet seeing those eyes adds a lot to the picture, to the emotions of the monkey and to the emotions of the viewer. All I did was highlight the two eyes and then increase the brightness some. Took all of 30 seconds in Photoshop.
It’s all in the eyes!
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!
HDR on an antique gasoline engine
I’m not a big fan of HDR because most people (all except one that I’m aware of) go way overboard with it. Most people seem to use HDR for landscapes, which I don’t like. Using terminology created to describe the overboard effect, the pictures look “overcooked.”
That doesn’t mean that I’m not exploring the ins and outs of HDR to see if I might like its effect, or some of its effects, in areas other than landscapes. Or possibly being a little less extreme in using its effects on landscapes.
One subject matter that I have always believed could benefit from HDR is antiques, especially machinery. As I was cataloging pictures this morning, I found two slightly different exposures of an antique gasoline engine:
I didn’t think they would be different enough to do anything with using HDR, not to mention the fact that usually you want at least three different exposures for HDR. However, I took those two exposures to Photoshop CS6 and asked it to use its “Merge to HDR Pro” function to give me something a little more colorful, sharper, etc. After playing around for a while with the settings in HDR Pro, here’s what I got that I did like:
I think the HDR photo shows the age of the old engine better than the two original photos.
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!
Motor Transport Museum of San Diego
During yesterday morning’s adventure beyond the boondocks, I found many subjects worthy of photography. One of them was the Motor Transport Museum of San Diego. It’s a huge factory from decades ago, too big to fit it all into my 28-300mm lens. Keeping in mind my previous work with the Photomerge function of Photoshop, I took five pictures and sent them to Photoshop, which gave me this:
As you can see, the picture’s a little crooked and the buildings seem to be leaning extraordinarily. Since there has not been an earthquake recently….
With previous landscape panoramas I have done, I simply cropped the picture to make it straight. However, landscape panoramas rarely have tilting buildings in them, so this is a perspective issue.
Fortunately, Photoshop can easily correct that, too. I simply clicked on the crop tool, then the perspective tool, drew a perspective box on the picture, adjusted the sides of the box to indicate what should be straight, and then clicked on okay. Photoshop worked its magic and gave me this:
Much better.
Unfortunately, the museum is only open from 10:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. on Saturdays. I guess you know where I’m going on a future Saturday, probably sooner rather than later.
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!
You don’t have to be a purist, featuring Zoey the Cool Cat
“Purist” is a word that I don’t think I’ve ever liked because it often is used to put down the creativity of others, creativity which the purist often couldn’t do or didn’t want to do. Now that doesn’t apply to all purists, just probably about 80% of them, which is a good supermajority.
Several decades ago when I was a Realtor, I used to compile a list of all the properties that were for sale in my farming area. I also had the addresses of all the properties, their most recent sale date, and the price they sold at. I got all the information from going down to the Courthouse and searching through the public records. I was told by the established Realtors that a “purist” wouldn’t work that way. Oh. (I lasted in the Texas oil-boom-to-bust longer than they did.)
When I opened a computer store in the mid-1980s, I sent flyers out to all the houses within a five-mile radius. I was told a purist would just have a grand opening and be done with it. Oh. (My competition eventually packed up and moved.)
I have many more examples, but you get the message.
Photography is the same way. Many older photographers, like me, grew up with film cameras and darkroom developing. Now that digital photography and digital photo editing programs like Photoshop, PaintShop Pro, Gimp, and others are here, some of the older photographers seem to be too proud to use them. They claim to be “photography purists.”
Some are even hanging on to the last vestiges of film cameras and developing in their own private darkrooms. Talk about expensive and time consuming. They are still using filters and filter stacking out in the field. Why? “To get the best I can out of the camera.” That’s all well and good, and it’s a lot of fun to be out and about taking pictures, but there is simply no way to get as many pictures out in the field as what Photoshop will give you back at the office.
I submit that if you want to have a lot of fun, learn a good digital photo editing program as well as your camera and your lenses. Once you know what all three can give you — their strengths and weaknesses — you can double or even triple your fun. The way I do this is to dedicate a minimum of 30 minutes each day to whatever new tasks I am seeking to learn. Right now it’s Photoshop CS6.
You don’t have to be a “purist” in order to accomplish what the “purists” accomplish. In fact, the beauty of technology is that, indeed, you don’t have to be a “purist” at all. If you have an interest in something, or see something that someone else did, don’t question whether or not it is “purist.” Just see if you can do the same thing! Explore. And if you accomplish the same thing using different tools, that’s okay! In fact, it just might give you a leg up on your competition.
I just finished reading Best Photoshop Filters, by Susannah Hall (ISBN 978-0-321-75422-6), 415 pages, retails for $49.99. It discusses all the filters in Photoshop CS6, and there are a slew of them.
Photoshop filters are basically presets that allow you to do one-click modifications to your pictures. Following are 26 examples, using Zoey the Cool Cat as our model. With all of the modifications one can make to the presets, there are probably tens of thousands of different things one can do to one’s pictures. I could have sat here all day playing with these filters but at some point, well, there is work to do and bills to be paid…. 
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Hope you enjoy these. My favorites are 7, 12, 20, 22, and 26, with 20 being my #1. Let me know your favorites.
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Picture 2
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Picture 5
Picture 6
Picture 7
Picture 8
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Picture 10
Picture 11
Picture 12
Picture 13
Picture 14
Picture 15
Picture 16
Picture 17
Picture 18
Picture 19
Picture 20
Picture 21
Picture 22
Picture 23
Picture 24
Picture 25
Picture 26
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!
Bad pictures. Bad, bad pictures. Go to…………….Photoshop?
Slowly but surely I’m having fun going through my bad picture folders to salvage any pictures that might actually be salvageable. Sometimes it requires some critical and creative thinking to visualize if I might ever be able to make something out of the picture. If my final answer is a big, fat ”NO!” then I’ll delete the picture. Sometimes I have duplicates and I simply pick the best duplicate and delete the others. Sometimes I get to really put Photoshop CS6 to task, such as in the pictures below. Remember, these are all salvaged pictures.
The picture is of the woodpecker featured in yesterday’s post (We’re moving in). The second picture is a great picture of the woodpeckers’ nest in the flower stalk of a century plant.
Various birds from my early birding adventures this past January:
Dogs always capture my attention:
Remember, these were all bad pictures, bad bad pictures that I was prepared to throw away if I couldn’t make something out of them. Let’s hear it for Photoshop:
Give me a P.
P!
Give me an H.
H!
Give me an O.
O!
Give me a T.
T!
Give me another O!
O!
Give me an S.
S!
Give me an H.
H!
Give me another O!
O
Give me a P!
P!
What does it spell?
I have no idea. That word was so long that I’ve forgotten the early letters.
For every picture, here are the steps I took:
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Adjust overall exposure, usually lighter.
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Adjust overall shadows, usually lighter.
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Crop to 1000 pixels on long side.
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Clone out offending objects — people parts, tree parts, etc.
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Adjust overall contrast.
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Use layers and masks to adjust shadows and contrast in specific areas.
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Sharpen (I forgot to sharpen a couple of the pictures; you might be able to determine which ones.)
Note: Photography researchers seem to believe (probably based on research……lol) that most people prefer sharp, high contrast pictures. Once you believe that — and I do! — make contrast and sharpen adjustments the last thing you do to a picture. Otherwise you could have some unexpected results that clearly show what you’ve been up to in your photoshopping.
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!
