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:
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!
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Visit Photographic Art by Russel Ray Photos at Fine Art America.
That is really good for a first attempt! Can’t wait to see what else you can put together. By the way I love the light and shadows on the wooden floor. Looks great.
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Thanks! The more I look at it, though, the more I see the flaws. But, again, I think it is pretty good for a first attempt.
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:-). Keep going, though I have to admit I don’t see the flaws you see! I blame my untrained eye!
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Very cool! And thanks to you and Google I now know what a “muntin” is.
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Yahooooooo! Google!
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I think the muntins are related to the munchkins…. second cousins or something like that……..LOL
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What is a muntin?
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Google and Wikipedia are you friend, Rajiv…………LOL
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I’ll believe you…I think. 😀
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Just keep repeating: “I believe. I believe. I believe….”
LOL
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Right! Will start working on that!
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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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I have found that the only difference between the current versions of Paintshop Pro and Photoshop is terminology and layout (Corel is Canadian) and the fact that Photoshop has a bigger advertising budget than Corel does.
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amazing work
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Not bad for a first try…..I just look at Photoshop and my brain breaks 🙂
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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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Looks like you need Wine to get Photoshop to run on Linux. Google “does photoshop work on Linux” and you’ll get tutorials on how to do it.
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I have Wine and PlayOnLinux which is how I run Office 2010. I’ll have to check that out, because I have always wanted to be able to use Photoshop, but always got frustrated.
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Nice piece of work Russel Don’t tell us that Zoey could be a lie there at Russel Ray Photos. 😦
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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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Not only is Big Brother watching, it’s sanitising what is shown. You can’t take any pic or video on face value at all.
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