Blog Archives
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!
Friday Flower Fiesta — Geraniums & Pelargoniums
Many decades ago we would identify geraniums and pelargoniums by their leaves, and as geraniums. In today’s world, due to DNA and genome identification, what you and I traditionally thought of as geraniums — those with big, beautiful, round heads of flowers — are actually “zonal pelargoniums.” Both geraniums and pelargoniums are in the Geraniaceae family. Very few geraniums are sold in plant nurseries simply because they are not as showy as the pelargoniums.
I have thousands of pictures of pelargoniums and hundreds of geraniums. The problem with pictures of pelargoniums is that by the time the flower stalk is full of flowers, some of the older flowers look pretty ratty. Today I discovered how to resolve that problem.
First, I cloned out the ratty parts of the pictures using Photoshop CS6. Along with other minor cleanup (contrast, highlights, shadows), I applied the Fractalius filter sharpening to them. Then I took them to CorelDRAW! X6 and made paintings out of them using the Trace Bitmap function. Since I was making paintings out of them, I didn’t have to be real careful in Photoshop with the quality of the cloning. That made it a lot easier since geraniums and pelargoniums have a lot of nooks and crannies amongst the leaves and flowers.
Following are my pelargonium paintings for our Friday Flower Fiesta, all of them from my gardens over the years. Some of the original pictures were small, unfocused, low resolution pictures from old point & shoot cameras; making paintings out of them allows me to save them as something more beautiful than just a documentation of my old gardens.
The last painting is of some pelargonium leaves — one reason why I like pelargoniums is because when they are not blooming, they still look gorgeous because of their many leaf colors and shapes. If you really want something unique in your garden, get some smelly pelargoniums, more properly called “scented-leaf pelargoniums.” They come in chocolate, lemon, apple, coconut, rose, strawberry, nutmeg, and many other smells.
Picture 1
Picture 2
Picture 3
Picture 4
Picture 5
Picture 6
Picture 7
Picture 8
Picture 9
Picture 10
Picture 11
Picture 12
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!
Find Photoshop expensive? Consider leasing.
Currently on my computer I have these digital photo editing programs:
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Adobe Photoshop CS6
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Adobe Lightroom 4.1
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Corel PaintShop Pro X4
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Corel Photo-Paint X6
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CorelDRAW! X6
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Word 2010 (don’t underestimate it!)
I have had Photoshop, Photo-Paint, CorelDRAW!, and Word since their initial releases decades ago.
When I went to upgrade Photoshop, I discovered the steep price. I also discovered Lightroom, so rather than the steep price for a Photoshop upgrade, I opted to continue using my very old version of Photoshop and learn Lightroom.
When I went to upgrade my very old versions of Photo-Paint and DRAW!, I discovered PaintShop Pro. The price was very reasonable, so I bought it.
I use all of those programs for various purposes, but my current goal is to see if I can get Photoshop to do everything. If I can, then ultimately I’ll be migrating my skills in all the other programs over to Photoshop.
I think that Photoshop is the most powerful individual programs, but if I combine DRAW! X6 and either Photo-Paint X6 or Paintshop Pro X4, I can do in them anything that Photoshop can do. The question is, “How easily?” or “How much time is involved?”
For example, I use CorelDRAW! X6 to do the Zoey the Cool Cat approval stamp at the end of each post. It takes me about 15 seconds. To do it is Photoshop would take several layers and lots of time, and I haven’t found that Photoshop Actions can really automate everything for me yet.
I use Word 2010 to create quick frames, like the one I use for my wise old grandmother:
That took about 15 seconds in Word 2010.
I use Lightroom 4.1 to give me quick JPGs from RAW files and to do quick adjustments for exposure, highlights, shadows, contrast, and clarity (sharpness). Five sliders takes about 30 seconds. The same tasks in Photoshop takes several minutes due to having to go through Adobe Camera Raw first and then into Photoshop. Minimum of five layers in Photoshop.
I use Photo-Paint to create GIFs. It’s the easiest program I’ve found for that:
PaintShop Pro X4 is very similar to Photoshop, and I’ve found it much easier to use. However, simply because Photoshop is the defacto standard throughout the world, Photoshop is where I’m dedicating my time. When you have a defacto standard, you have a lot of people doing tutorials and creating plugins and such. So Photoshop it is.
One you have created certain effects that you like in any of the programs, you can either save the file as a template and then just replace the picture as needed (that’s what I do in CorelDRAW! and Word) or you can create actions, scripts, or macros in the other programs to automate tasks. As with anything, it takes time to set it up initially but then the ROI on your time is returned each succeeding time you do the same thing.
If you’re considering Photoshop and find the price too steep, consider leasing it, which is what I do. I have a one-year lease with Adobe that costs me $19.99 a month. Considering that the full program is $699, it would take me 35 months of leasing to pay for the program. That’s three years. During those three years, Adobe will come out with two upgrades, costing you $199 each, another $400. You’ll never be able to stay up to date with the latest and the greatest. With a lease, you can.
Twenty dollars a month is less than any of my other individual bills — gas, phone, cable, mortgage, electricity, etc., and something I can easily afford. Coming up with $699 all at one time, and then $199 every 18 months, can often be difficult for the 99%.
If you’re considering a Photoshop lease, when you go to buy the product, in the dropdown box, select “Subscription” instead of “Upgrade” or “Full.”
Once you have any of these programs, if you have a question about how to do something, ask me. If I don’t know how to do it, I’ll find out. It helps me learn, and real-world examples are always much more fun than reading through a book or watching a tutorial.
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 rose by any other name is still a rose
My apologies to the literariasts (!) for bastardizing a great Shakespeare quote in Romeo and Juliet (“What’s in a name? that which we call a rose By any other name would smell as sweet”), but I just discovered that in many software programs you can define black, white, and gray.
I started having a little fun by telling CorelDRAW X6 that a deep dark red was actually black. I took this picture of a giant hibiscus at the San Diego Zoo yesterday:
I clicked on the color definition eyedropper for black and then clicked a dark red. CorelDRAW then reprocessed the image in just a couple of seconds. Then I clicked on “Auto adjust” and got this:
I was trying to analyze just exactly what CorelDRAW did and determined that if red is black, then there is a lot of the picture that is underexposed. Thus, when CorelDRAW went to auto adjust the picture, all those black (red) areas were brighted up a wee bit.
This opens a whole new realm of creating something that is me, kind of like Rubicorno has defined himself. The difference is that I can create my own preset, a preset that no one else in the world has.
At the very least, I’ve found something to do with my 73,000 pictures in my old age. 
If my wise old grandmother were here, she’d say, “Interesting….”
Looking for real estate services in San Diego County? I can highly recommend
James Frimmer, Realtor with Century 21 Award, DRE #01458572
If you’re just looking for a home inspector,
I can highly recommend Russel Ray; that’s me!
Friday Flower Fiesta — #9 (March 23, 2012)
All pictures copyright 2012 Russel Ray Photos
I got into trouble at Walmart today. I stopped to get some Shedd’s Spread after my home inspection. As usual, I always enter and leave through the gardening center. They were particularly well stocked today with some beautiful flowers. I decided to take the Shedd’s Spread to the car, get my Canon 550D, and take a couple of pictures of the columbines and pansies. Turns out that you are not supposed to take pictures inside Walmart. I asked how they monitored all of the smart phones with cameras. No answer. Of course, I had a big, bad, professional DSLR….
Picture 1 — Columbine
All pictures copyright 2012 Russel Ray Photos
Picture 2 — Columbine
All pictures copyright 2012 Russel Ray Photos
Picture 3 — Columbine
All pictures copyright 2012 Russel Ray Photos
Picture 4 — Pansy
All pictures copyright 2012 Russel Ray Photos
Picture 5 — Pansy 
All pictures copyright 2012 Russel Ray Photos
Picture 6 — Pansy 
All pictures copyright 2012 Russel Ray Photos
Columbines and pansies are two of my favorite flowers, definitely in my
Top 10. I was surprised to see so many pansies in the garden center since they really are a winter plant here in San Diego.
All pictures copyright 2012 Russel Ray Photos
All pictures taken by Russel Ray with a Canon 550D camera and a Canon
55-250mm lens. Post-processing was done in Adobe Photoshop CS6 Beta, and picture framing was done in Corel Draw X6.
All pictures copyright 2012 Russel Ray Photos
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