A week’s worth of work all in one picture

29 Replies

How I Did It

Long-time readers know that I have been on a mission to accomplish in Photoshop everything that I previously had been doing in Corel Draw, Corel Photo-Paint, and Corel PaintShop Pro.

Until recently, those three Corel programs collectively cost less than half of what Photoshop cost.

Now, with software coming to us out of the cloud, Photoshop 2014 is a mere $9.99 a month. That is a significant savings over the previous cost of a full version of Photoshop and upgrades as they came out.

This past week I have been working on really getting to know what I can do using layers and masks, and here is the product of my work:

Sunny Window

That is a conglomeration of many pictures: wood floor, curtains and windows but without muntins, sunset, condos overlooking Mission Bay, and water and boats. I created the muntins myself; that took the most time.

I had to use layer masks to get the sun to be bright enough to shine through the window, but since the windows didn’t have muntins, the whole thing look too artificial. After I created the muntins, the sun shining on the floor looked artificial, so I had to add shadows cast by the muntins. That took the second most amount of time.

Although adding muntins created a better look, it was strenuous work then to mask out each of the itty bitty windows in order to let the water and boats show through. That was the third most amount of time.

I am off a little in the perspective with some of the muntins, but considering this was my first time to try to do this in Photoshop, I think I did pretty good, and next time I want to do something like this, it will go much faster and more smoothly.

Remember: Anything you see here at Russel Ray Photos might be a lie!

Pictures copyright 2012 Russel Ray Photos

This post approved by Zoey the Cool Cat

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29 thoughts on “A week’s worth of work all in one picture”

  5. Dan Antion

    Very nice done. I have to say that you might be the first photog that I’ve ever hear speak highly of Paintshop Pro. I used it for years and I’d bet I could do more in it today than Photoshop. Not that the product is lacking but the learning curve was steep. BTW, I’ve made divided-light windows and I think making the muntins out of wood might be easier.

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    1. Russel Ray Photos Post author

      Don’t try to learn everything in one day. That will, indeed, cause one’s brain to break. Rather, if you want to learn how to do something, go learn. The nice thing about Photoshop is that, because it’s the defacto standard, there are billions of tutorials about anything and everything, and those tutorials comprise video or static lessons.

      I have been on my mission since January 2012. I’m getting there but once I get there, I suspect I’ll want more!

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      1. songtothesirens

        Wow, that’s almost two years! I run Linux as my OS. I don’t know how well Photoshop would play with it, but I have a similar program called GIMP albeit with fewer features than Photoshop. I have yet to try Photoshop with Linux. I have created some interesting layered fractals with GIMP though (quite by accident). I’ll have to see if Photoshop plays with Linux or not. A lot of Windows and MAC programs won’t, but there are a lot of open source programs that are similar.

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        1. Russel Ray Photos Post author

          I have played around with GIMP. It’s pretty good, especially for a free program. Possibly the only reason I’m not using it is the same reason I don’t use anything except Photoshop at this point, and that is because Photoshop is the de facto standard. Thus there are more tutorials and lessons on how to do the things that I want to do.

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          1. songtothesirens

            There is actually quite the thriving forum and tutorial community dealing with all things Linux on the web. If you can’t find it, ask, and somebody will find or create the answer for you. There are a lot of Linux coding junkies that are more than willing to help out newbies like me.

            I can see why you would use Photoshop though, because it works with so many different formats and you don’t have to figure out how to save something as a .jpeg like you do with GIMP. That took me forever to figure out, until one day I said to myself what is the “export” function? And there it was. Every format that you could think of.

            Linux is a bit like a mystery novel. You have to follow your nose 🙂

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            1. Russel Ray Photos Post author

              Any software is like that when you are just learning it. Heck, Photoshop is still like that for me after 2½ years!

              If you look at the operating market share as of August 2014, you find:

              Windows 7 – 51%
              Windows XP – 24%
              Windows 8x – 13%
              Windows Vista – 3%
              OS X – 7%
              Linux – 2%

              Windows has 91% of the market, which is why so many companies still don’t program for Apple (e.g., Corel) and Linux. Sure, the Linux Geeks are there and helpful , but with Windows, you don’t have to be a Geek in order to be helpful.

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              1. songtothesirens

                I like the challenge of getting the coding and the program dependencies right….I think I like to frustrate myself 🙂 I also just do not like the direction that Windows is going. I loved Windows 7, but they are even getting rid of that here soon in favor of the Windows 8 builds. I do not know why they cannot just leave the good stuff alone. XP and 7 are the two most stable OS they produced, and they have already cut off support for XP. I also like that Linux does not leave a big footprint which makes it perfect for large files.

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                1. Russel Ray Photos Post author

                  I think Windows 8 is far superior in stability to XP and 7. What I don’t understand is why the biggest complaints about 8 come from the people with smart phones. All Windows 8 is, is a great big smart phone!

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                  1. songtothesirens

                    I know. I think I didn’t like 8 because I don’t want my PC to act like my phone. i don’t know. I tried 8 for a few weeks, and I just didn’t like it for some reason. Maybe it was all the different “windows.” I had a very hard time creating groups that made sense to me. But, I have an iPhone 5s which is completely different than any smartphone I have had to date. But that’s Apple for you.

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                    1. Russel Ray Photos Post author

                      I don’t have a smart phone simply because I don’t like them. My phone is a 2003 Star Trek flip phone. It makes and receives phone calls, which is what I want a phone to do. So when I saw Windows 8, I wasn’t upgrading. Went I went to buy a new computer, though, it came with Windows 8.1, so I had to learn it. After using it, I find it to be extremely stable and very good, so I won’t hesitate when my Windows 7 computer goes kaput.

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    1. Russel Ray Photos Post author

      Well, you just never know. Even though I’ve posted videos of her, I don’t even trust videos anymore, not after December 31, 1999, “live” from Times Square which proved that it wasn’t so live after all. The TV station I was watching was cleaning the video before showing it so that the racy ads and the competition’s ads in Time Square weren’t in the “live” video feed that we were watching.

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