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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:
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You can do better than what the camera gives you
I am a firm believer in the adage, “What comes out of the camera is just the basics to start with.” Fireworks are an excellent example. I got lots of great fireworks pictures last night at the SeaWorld (San Diego) Spectacular! fireworks show. However, each picture — bar none! — had something wrong with it…. underexposed, overexposed, too far away, too close, extraneous lights in the picture, people in the picture….
Fireworks, then, make a great case for using digital photo editing programs. To wit, below are pairs of pictures, the original first and my edited version second.
I used both Adobe Lightroom 4.1 and Corel PaintShop Pro X4 to do editing. I like the crop function and the clone functions in PaintShop Pro better than Lightroom and Photoshop, so I used PaintShop Pro to crop the pictures and clone streetlights, people, and extraneous light speckes out of the pictures. After saving the result, I went to Lightroom where I used the Contrast, Highlights, Shadows, Blacks, and Clarity sliders (Love sliders, edible or not!) to get rid of smoke glare, overexposure, and underexposure.
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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