November Panorama, Corfu.

The top picture was how Photoshop combined two upright landscapes of the valley and bay looking towards Corfu Town. In 'Image Size' dimensions and the resolution were chosen. For future printing resolution should be 300 dpi, but for screen viewing where no magnification is expected 72 dpi is OK. Instead of cropping the mis-match I filled in the blank bits using the 'clone-stamp'


The foreground was selected with the 'wand' and places where the selection was not good were mended, also with the clone-stamp. The selected foreground was lightened with the 'levels' tool which enables you to lighten, darken, and modify contrasts. then the foreground was 'deselected' and the colours were brightened with 'saturation'. (ctrl +U) . With practice, and using keyboard shortcuts, this amount of work takes a few minutes only.


If you have an image or two you would like improved simply, just mail me a file I can import into photoshop. If there is anything interesting I can do, and with your permission I will post the effort here. Otherwise the new file will be posted back.

The Sky's the Limit

It's DISMAL, I know - boring colours, flat composition. Not much to be done with it, but scroll down anyway to see the effect of cropping, increasing the colour saturation, and clicking on two Photoshop filters called Rough Pastel and Angled Strokes, You can choose settings for these filters but they show up right away and you can play with different ones. 


 These notes are not intended as tutorials but to show what can be done easily, and with other editing programs as well.


Simple improvements are really quick once you are familiar with a few tools. and for the creatively inclined, the sky really is the limit.

Role(up) Model

A nice moment from Senka, my daughter's visit to Corfu with Biba, but who needs all the rubbish in the background? It was there, right? Yes, but so what - it wrecks the picture. Out comes the clone stamp and in about twenty minutes we have a picture. Photoshop is of course the senior editor, but others can do this sort of thing. All digital images can do with a little 'sharpen', and usually a little 'crop' 


Please scroll down for the improved picture.  I might just mention that Google's Picasa system of organizing pictures is very good, and free.

Porgy, Bess, and little Socrates

I wish all my patient and gifted friends on Blogger, and BlogCatalog the kind of holiday they want and a great New Year. Dr.Awsom has a card for you as well below this one, and an important message. Well, it would be wouldn't it. The picture above taken a few months ago was one of those lucky times when very slow focussing did not ruin the picture. The composition was improved greatly (I say) by shifting Socrates a little to the left so that 1. the little black ears 'read' better and the framing could be a bit squarer. A Photoshop filter called 'angled strokes' gives a subtle painted look, which is often all I do to make a picture from a photograph. Slight unsharpness is also improved by this filter which creates tiny 'cells' of colour with sharp edges. The high-res image shows this better of course. This picture will bring me joy for ever not only because these cats are special, but because the composition is almost perfect. Can I say that? I think so because there are rules, and they are the same for everyone. But not important for everyone. Like wrong notes in music - if they're wrong they're wrong.

Out the back. A photo-composition.

Started to-day's posts at the crack of dawn - too late now to load images. The original camera image and an intermediate picture are helpful to show the process of composing, please come back for them if you have to. Until a scanner is installed recent digital pictures are all I have to work with, but will get out more now that spring is on its way.

Composition is a wide subject, and only partly a matter of geometry. Personal habits of framing the picture develop slowly but one of the most basic habits to acquire is to avoid centralizing the main subject every time. This requires a little effort with auto-focus because the area that focuses is always central on simple cameras. If you focus on the subject (or main subject), keep the release half pressed, and then frame your picture, you will have taken a step towards creating a picture - rather than being an automatic extension of an automatic camera!

A second very important habit to acquire is being prepared to move around a bit (if possible) to avoid distracting details near your main subject. Posts or trees 'growing' out of a person's head is the great cliche for this. A good editing program is a modern miracle for the photographer, and 'clone stamp' or 'healing brush' are fabulous tools.

Don't forget to send me any picture you like, maybe to play with at this end. Go well.

Molly, for composition - raw image

Straight from the camera; except for the crop no clean-up, no filters. The most glaring compositional faults for me are the continuation of Molly's outline in the rock below, and the 'lumpy' boring shape of the subject, even though the outline is reasonably clear . Molly's profile is not strong either. No more than 4/10 for this shot, but the clean-up is a little better perhaps.

Even Cats Dream (5)

This is version 5 (soft) of my first ever 'Photoshop' painting which was constructed from abstract and un-considered shapes filled with colour, duplicated, copied, moved, etc while trying to make a 'composition' and then trying to make 'sense' of this. This over months of returning and editing with only a real beginners grasp of this amazing program's tools. I am not an artist who can create (anything I would like) easily. Except in my dreams.

I am also too easily prevented from starting a picture because of difficulties in visualizing, but often like what I see after doodling with almost no attention to what I am doing. It was virtually impossible for me make a phone call without a pad in front of me and a balpoint in my hand. (and not just because of a seive-like memory!)

Got any good doodles? Send them to Dr A.