Photoshop Fun (While Learning)

I posted a couple of pictures of my wife, Rena, and I a couple of days ago. We took the pics on our recent trip to Saskatchewan. I have been playing around in the 30 day demo version of Photoshop CS3, trying to learn different and new things that will be useful if I actually ever do this as a business. I gave the extract filter a try on the picture of my wife and pulled her out of the picture and put her in with me. A little bit of scaling and it almost looks like we were both in the picture at the same time. A uselful tool to say the least.

I know for many these things are second nature in Photoshop, but it's all new for me and, even though a ripe old age of 53, it is invigorating learning all this new stuff. Now all I have to do is figure out how to retain it.

CS3

In finally got around to installing the 30 day trial version of Photoshop CS3. Whew! Quite the program. I had started to get to know some of the features of Elements 3 (an ancient program since they just released version 6) and some things are a bit different in terms of menus and toolbar buttons. Of course, the major difference is in all the additional, pro features that you don't get in Elements. Like masks and smart filters and many others I haven't even begun to explore.

I did a couple of cool things and I've posted some pictures below. Following Scott Kelby's Photoshop CS3 book, I double processed a picture. I had a picture from my recent trip to Saskatchewan of the sun shining through some clouds that looked quite neat. However, the picture was exposed for the bright sky and the foreground was deep in shadows. Basically, you open two copies of the raw file in Photoshop, one corrected for the sky and one brightened for the dark foreground, put them together, with the bright copy on top and then make a mask and just paint the dark sky back into the picture. Very cool and gives you a picture that you probably can't capture in camera.

So here was the best I could do using just regular processing. You can see that the bottom is very dark and I was not at all happy with how it turned out.













But using the double processing I mentioned above, I was able to get this picture, which, though not perfect, is a far better picture than above, although I'm sure there are those who would consider it overprocessed in Photoshop. I kind of like it a lot, though and that's the main thing for now.

**UPDATE** On closer inspection I see that the horizon line is not level. I will be fixing that later on and reposting the picture below.

**UPDATE 2** This has now been fixed.

Scenic Portraits

This was one of the stops my wife Rena and I made on our recent holiday. I believe this was on the way to Vernon from Banff. It was pretty enough that I pulled out the tripod and set it up. So we took some pictures of ourselves.

Another Animoto Slide Show

I'm still playing around a little bit with this Animoto site. Here's another slide show with a few pictures from our vacation this summer. Animoto currently allows and unlimited number of 30 second shows. Longer ones are either $3 per show or you can sign up for a year for $30. It could be an interesting way to show off photos.

I have to admit, it's a little wild for people of my generation, but it seems to be right up there in league with YouTube and Facebook and stuff like that. Wow! You can even post it on Facebook.

Summer Vacation Slide Show

I've been looking for a way to more easily share some of my pictures and here's a new way that I've just discovered. It's pictures from the summer in the Okanagan that I have referred to in a previous post and linked to (I believe) to my Phanfare site. But this might make it easier all around. Let me know what you think.

Lots of Pictures

I've just returned from two weeks holidays camping (well, if you call it that, we do use a 19 foot travel trailer with a queen size bed and a bathroom down the hall) outside of Vernon, B.C. Saw lots of family and friends and took a ton of pictures with the new camera. A lot were simply snapshots but I was trying to learn the features of the camera and get back into the specific abilities of an SLR versus a point and shoot.

Some mistakes I made were: changing the ISO for low light situations and forgetting to change it back in bright light settings; switching to aperture or shutter priority for specific shots and then forgetting to change that back to adapt for different situations; just plain failing to make changes to ISO or shutter or aperture to accommodate the shooting situation; and relying too much on the auto focus and ending up with the wrong thing in focus - too common a problem for all of us.

But, all of this is a good learning experience and it is why I took so many shots. Some of the one's I think are better are posted on my Flickr Photo page. Here's one I especially like:

Enjoy.