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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.
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A fish out of water
A couple of decades ago I bought the original versions of Adobe Photoshop and Corel Photo-Paint. My work required them. I preferred Photo-Paint; it was much easier to use.
When I moved to San Diego in 1993, I no longer had a need for either of the two programs so I quit upgrading them. Now, with over 75,000 pictures, I have a need again.
I upgraded Adobe Photoshop 8 to Photoshop CS6. In other words, I had to buy the full version of CS6 since they don’t allow upgrades that are more than two versions old. Customer service would make no exceptions.
I upgraded Corel Photo-Paint 8 to Photo-Paint X6. Corel also doesn’t allow upgrades for more than two versions, but after talking with customer service and taking them through my many version registrations with them — I still had all the serial numbers and purchase dates — Corel allowed me to upgrade, a savings of about $200.
That pretty much tells you why I’m a Corel fan more so than an Adobe fan.
I also bought Adobe Lightroom 4 and Corel PaintShop Pro X4.
I use mostly Lightroom 4 because it works the best with RAW files. Once I have a JPG from the RAW file, I tend to use PaintShop Pro to modify them.
My current focus is learning the ins and outs of Photoshop CS6, where I feel like a fish out of water. One thing that I never liked in Photoshop is its clone tool. I found it cumbersome at best, and horrible at worst. That was until today when I discovered the secret to making the clone tool work properly. It’s all in the hardness of the tool:
Once I started playing around with the hardness, I was able to get the clone tool to do what I always thought it should do. As usual, the devil is in the details………..
Following is my “Fish out of water,” what I thought was going to be a great picture when I took it a couple of days ago on my Mission Beach/Mission Bay Walk:
Unfortunately, there is one solitary succulent blossom sticking up into the fish’s mouth. Aaack!
I could easily resolve that issue in about five minutes using PaintShop Pro. I went to Photoshop instead to see if I could make it a five-minute job there. I did. Here’s the result:
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!
Poor resolution? You actually CAN make it better!
Poor resolution? You actually CAN make it better!
If you don’t know it by now, whenever you edit a JPG (or JPEG) picture file and save it, it gets degraded. That’s because JPG throws away information that it deems not necessary. Of course, you and the JPG software programmers might have different opinions of what information is not necessary.
From July 2007 to January 2012, I was blogging on a different platform. I left that platform because it was a private web site run by basically two people who were heavily biased in favor of their good old boy club. I’ve never been a member of a good old boy club…. never will be. Just not my style. I believe in judging on merit and action.
I had a little over 3,800 blog posts, so when I chose to leave, I certainly didn’t want to lose all my words of wisdom, pictures, etc. Although I was able to save them all, I noticed that the pictures were very poor, basically unusable. However, being the picture pack rat that I am, I didn’t trash them. I just put them in a “SOMEDAY” file.
Someday might have arrived.
Back in February I went to a seminar and, while listening to the explanation of file formats — JPG, RAW, GIF, TIFF, etc. — which I already knew, I started daydreaming. Earlier this evening my daydream came true.
Here is a picture from the other platform of Zoey the Cool Cat that I retrieved:
I like that picture but it’s flat, washed out, and soft focus. It’s 800 x 533 pixels, which is the size of all my early pictures…. stupid me. It’s also a mere 281 KB. I took it to Lightroom and modified it to get this:
The tile has more contrast, Zoey the Cool Cat looks prettier, and the whole picture is sharper.
After modifying the original picture, I exported it from Lightroom as a TIFF using 300 ppi resolution and 16-bit color. Surprisingly, the TIFF file was a whopping 2.46 MB. Lots of new information! Then I opened the TIFF in Corel PaintShop Pro X4 and simply saved it as a JPG.
You could do the same thing in Photoshop or Lightroom but I find PaintShop Pro X4 easier to use for simple file conversions. The only reason I converted it to JPG was because WordPress here doesn’t recognize TIFF files.
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