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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’m gettin’ good
For some reason I have this infatuation with wildlife that is either yawning, eating, grooming, or just letting that lazy tongue have a little look-see. At the San Diego Zoo Safari Park this past weekend, the three lions were up close and personal, about two inches away (or whatever the thickness of the glass is). I got what I thought was a great photo of one of the female lions:
There is not too much that is right with that picture — the lion gets lost in the background; there are flies at the corner of its mouth, on its tongue and on the top of its nose; there’s no contrast between the lion and the background…. Aaack!
Remembering what my wise old grandmother always said as she put together her photo albums and scrapbooks — “What comes out of the camera is just the basics to start with!” — I first went to Lightroom because I know it better than Photoshop. I didn’t really get anything much better.
In trying to get some contrast between the lion and the background, the color cast got shifted. On to Photoshop.
After first working in Adobe Camera Raw, I got a little better contrast and color cast. At that point I took the resulting picture into Photoshop. After duplicating the picture, I applied a layer mask and then highlighted everything around the lion. Then I simply converted the background to black & white. Once that was done, I used a combination of the healing brush, the patch brush, and the clone tool to get rid of the flies.
Photoshop has an excellent feature called Content-Aware. After highlighting the flies, I simply hit the delete key. Photoshop doesn’t actually delete the flies. Instead it fills the area where the flies are, so up pops a Fill window with some options. The option I wanted was Contents, Content-Aware:
All of that gave me the result that I was looking for, and which the LCD screen in the bright sunshine at the Park indicated I had, but didn’t:
Whaddaya think?
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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