What comes out of the camera is just the basics to start with

When I was young and living with my wise old grandmother (picture ►), she used to sit at the dining room table during the day creating her scrapbooks and photo albums. Her sons used to chastise her because she would cut up her pictures to create what she wanted. As she used to say: “What comes out of the camera is just the basics to start with.” I can only imagine how much fun she would have in today’s world with Photoshop.

I bought Photoshop when it hit the PC market in the early 1990s. Throughout the years, my photo editing skills have continued to improve. Since I know what I can do with Photoshop, as well as video editing programs, basically I don’t believe anything I see on the Internet. Instead, if I like it, I enjoy it, perhaps even sharing it. But there is so much stuff that I know is fake, most, but not all, of it involving still pictures.

That reminds me of the broadcast from Times Square on December 31, 1999. The broadcast, of course, was live, as had been all the New Year’s Eve broadcasts for as long as I can remember. Not until later, though, was it disclosed that the broadcast wasn’t as live as we thought. Turns out that a big lighting display in Times Square was broadcasting an advertisement by a competitor of the television station that I was watching. I never saw the advertisement because it was being edited out as the video was being broadcast “live.” So even live events might not be the truth!

A couple of years ago I experimented with my own video editing. Watch this one minutes video of a Coaster train in the Miramar area of San Diego and tell me which way the train is traveling.

If you think the train is traveling left to right, well, only in the video. In actuality, it was traveling from right to left. I changed it in about five seconds and one click of the mouse using Corel Video Studio Pro.

Here in San Diego, commuter trains are of the push/pull configuration. In other words, sometimes the engine is at the front, pulling the train, and sometimes the engine is at the rear, pushing the train. I have never liked the push configuration; it just looks wrong. So when I discovered the “reverse” function in Video Studio Pro, well, I couldn’t help but click on it. Voilá!

I have had fun with still pictures, too, like this one:

In that one, there actually is only one bridge. The hole looked like an eye, so I thought that two eyes were better than one. Here is the original with just the one eye:

So remember: Just because you see it on the Internet and it’s been shared by 159,472 people and viewed 9,471,002 times doesn’t mean it’s true. That doesn’t mean you can’t simply enjoy it. As Edgar Degas said a century ago: “Art is not what you see but what you make others see.”

 

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Moving the mouse in a straight line in Photoshop

It’s no secret that ever since the advent of the computer mouse, those of us working with drawing programs such as Corel Draw and Adobe Illustrator wanted a way to draw a straight line. It didn’t take too long before Corel and Adobe gave us the ability to draw those straight lines.

Recently I was wanting to draw a perfectly straight line in Photoshop, and that’s when it occurred to me that since Photoshop also is an Adobe product, there just might be a way to draw a straight line.

A simple Google search told me how:

Select the Pen tool.
Position the Pen tool where you want the straight segment to begin, and click to define the first anchor point (do not drag).
Click again where you want the segment to end (Shift-click to constrain the angle of the segment to a multiple of 45°).

I’m pretty much a keyboard person, using the mouse only when the keyboard is awkward, like drawing lines.

While I was drawing lines, I inadvertently hit the shortcut key to get to the eraser. In my haste and not realizing that I had switched to the eraser, I clicked where I wanted the line to begin, Shift-clicked where I wanted the line to end, and voilà!, I erased in a perfectly straight line!

My mind started working.

Some experimentation indicated that I could do anything in a perfectly straight line simply by clicking where I wanted to start and Shift-clicking where I wanted to end….

pen tool – yep
eraser tool – yep
clone tool – yep
spot healing tool – yep
brush tool – yep

Doesn’t seem to matter what you need to do, if you need to do it in a straight line, try Click, Shift-click.

Lastly, does anyone have a recommendation for software that will record my screen while I do things? That would have been very convenient for this post.

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A week’s worth of work all in one picture

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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I have the answer:

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Inquiring minds want to know

Many decades ago when I had several years experience with photography, my goal was to have a huge collection of lenses for all purposes—fisheye, wide angle, super wide angle, zoom, ultra zoom, double ultra zoom, triple ultra zoom………

Although it might be nice to have all those lenses in today’s world, I find that I am completely satisfied with my Tamron 28-300mm lens and Photoshop. Photoshop has so many cool features that allow me to simulate all those lenses so well that no one would know what I had done unless I told them.

A good example is this Photographic Art creation:

That is based on a picture of a mural in the Little Italy area of San Diego. Ah, but I lie to you. That is based on FOUR pictures of a mural in the Little Italy area of San Diego. It was a wide mural, so it would not fit in my camera considering I couldn’t stand across the street because cars and utility poles would have been in the picture. I could have stood in the street, but it’s a busy street, and I know what typically happens when a 200-pound human takes on a 4,000-pound car. My only choice, then, was to take four pictures while standing on the walkway, just three feet or so from the mural. Here are the four original pictures:

Along with the mismatch in color contrast, brightness, exposure, etc., you can see that the perspective is going to be weird, especially for the two end pictures. This pretty much tells you where I was standing in order to leave cars, people, and poles out of the picture—right between the two ladies if you can’t tell.

First I corrected the perspective of the pictures, which gave me these four pictures:

Then I used Photoshop’s Photomerge function to merge the four pictures into one picture, giving me this:

After that it was just a question of making it into Photographic Art.

The one question that Julian had is why does the woman who is sitting down have a mustache. The attire certainly leads to one believing that it is a woman… Do Italian women have mustaches? Inquiring minds want to know.

Do you have BWS?
I have the answer:

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I cannot be trusted

I first started taking pictures in sixth grade when the principal, Miss Gustafson, asked for a volunteer photographer. She explained that the volunteer photographer would get in free to all sporting events, and the rest is history.

Even though I was using a Canon SLR in sixth grade, my first pictures really were just snapshots of the sports team and crowds.

In high school and college, my photography became more serious. I endeavored to understand the relationship between shutter speed, aperture, and ISO. Then throw in there film speed, film type, lenses, filters, and even film processing methods.

After college, I tried to develop a photographer’s eye for composition. Sometimes that meant sitting in the same spot for several hours waiting for just the right combination of things—light, weather, people (or lack thereof), etc. Sometimes I would take a picture and then go back several times over the next weeks and months, hoping to get a better picture.

Them days are gone………………………..

In today’s world of Adobe Photoshop & Lightroom, Corel Paintshop Pro, and many other digital photo software editing programs, I think I have come full circle, back to taking snapshots with my Canon 550D. I’m more interested in getting the picture and then making something out of it when I get back home. I think someone calls it “Photographic Art.”

For example, here’s a picture of two pigs sleeping at the San Diego County Fair:

It’s a cute picture, but I thought it could be better if I removed the bars from their pen, not to mention the food dish and the butt of the black pig in the other pen. I even thought about that while at the Fair because I took a picture of sawdust which I thought would be good to replace the bars with:

First I removed some sawdust from the pigs, as well as a few pigskin imperfections, by simple cloning, which Photoshop makes real easy. I cloned out some feathers from on top of the sawdust as well.

Then I masked the bars and deleted them. That left me with a huge blank space behind the pigs’ heads, but Photoshop also makes it pretty easy to insert just about anything into a picture.

Here is the result:

Isn’t it a lot better picture without the bars in there?

Lets you focus on the two pigs, especially the smiling pig, obviously in the midst of sweet dreams.

What you see at Russel Ray Photos might not be what you get. I just can’t be trusted.

Need a unique gift? Check out Photographic Art!

Visit Photographic Art by Russel Ray Photos at Fine Art America.

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Looking for real estate services in San Diego County?
I can highly recommend James Frimmer, Realtor, CDPE
CA BRE #01458572

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If you’re looking for a home inspector,
I recommend Russel Ray — that’s me!

Blah to beautiful with Photoshop!

I always like it when my home inspection Clients are satisfied with the home inspections I do for them.

Occasionally, though, a Client will call with a different matter.

I include pictures in my reports, usually of problems and problem areas. However, on the front page of the report is a picture of the front of the property that I inspected. Here is the picture from an inspection earlier this week:

Yep. It’s a picture of a house, specifically a manufactured home. A pretty blasé picture.

Now that my Photographic Art venture is viable, I decided that I should start including a Photographic Art picture of the home. I decided to replace the cloudy sky with a more beautiful sky, and bring some contrast and depth to the home and the plants. When I finished, I had this:

My Client called to ask me where I got the picture. I told him that I took a picture at the inspection, and since the picture was pretty blah, I used Photoshop to make it more beautiful. He was amazed. I pointed him to my Photographic Art Catalog, so who knows where this might lead somewhere down the road. Maybe he’ll buy billions and billions and billions of my work!

Tomorrow, just for my wonderful readers, I’ll be posting a tutorial on how to not only replace skies, but how to easily select detail like you find in those pine trees, a technique that works with anything that has a rough outline, like hair on a person’s head, cat and dog hair, etc. So be sure to tune in tomorrow, same bat time, same bat channel (smile if you grew up watching Batman!).

Need a unique gift?
Consider Photographic Art!Visit Russel Ray Photos.

►►►►◄◄◄◄

Looking for real estate services in San Diego County?
I can highly recommend James Frimmer, Realtor, CDPE
CA BRE #01458572

►►►►◄◄◄◄

If you’re looking for a home inspector,
I recommend Russel Ray — that’s me!

Caturday (11-2-13)—Zoey the Cool Cat playing soccer!

Long-time followers know that Zoey the Cool Cat likes to sit on the back of my desk chair and watch tennis or golf.

Zoey the Cool Cat watching tennis

She is not interested in football, basketball, or baseball.

I suspect that the balls in those sports are too big.

She prefers small things.

However, today, I found her playing with a soccer ball:

If you saw my recent post on the Zoey the Cool Cat cube, you might remember that I said the cube was really easy to do.

Taking the basics behind the cube, I decided to see if other shapes were just as easy to do.

Yes.

All I did was get a soccer ball from one of my graphics programs and then pasted Zoey the Cool Cat pictures into appropriate places.

It took about five minutes total!

Looking for real estate services in San Diego County?
I can highly recommend
James Frimmer, Realtor
Century 21 Award, BRE #01458572

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Rich to the right, commoners to the left

I have been using CorelDraw since it was released in January 1989. I consider myself an expert with it so it’s not unusual for me to use it when I need to do something quickly. The logo above and the Zoey the Cool Cat stamp at the end were done in CorelDraw. Quickly and easily, for me.

I know that Photoshop can do everything CorelDraw can do but since I don’t know how to do it, it takes longer. Lately I’ve been endeavoring to use Photoshop rather than CorelDraw, even though what takes me an hour in Photoshop would take me fifteen minutes in CorelDraw.

For example, here is a picture of stairs in San Clemente where I was this morning:

View Larger Map

After my home inspection, I went to the beach and railroad tracks. Directly above me was the exclusive neighborhood of Cotton Point, an enclave of multimillion dollar homes and the location of President Richard Nixon’s “Western White House.” Unfortunately, the enclave is so secluded, private, and gated that all I could get was a picture of a sign telling me that a home up there was for lease.

The first picture above reminded me of the presidential election last year, Mitt Romney’s 1% and we 99% commoners. Those stairs looked suspicious, especially since I was in one of those 1% communities and knowing that commoners throughout California have a right to beach access, notwithstanding the rich who often try to prevent access in and around their properties.

I wanted to remove the sign from the second picture, replace the text, and insert it near the stairs in the first picture. It took me 13 minutes to do it in CorelDraw. It took me one hour and twelve minutes to do it in Photoshop. However, now I know how to do it in Photoshop. Next time it won’t take as long.

Eventually I believe I’ll be able to do everything in Photoshop that I now do in CorelDraw, Corel PaintShop Pro, Corel Photo-Paint, and Image Resizer. Image that! One piece of software replaces four!

Oh, by the way, here’s the result:

Looking for real estate services in San Diego County?
I can highly recommend
James Frimmer, Realtor
Century 21 Award, BRE #01458572

If you’re looking for a home inspector,
I recommend Russel Ray — that’s me!

Discovery

San Diego County has some great beaches.

Coronado Beach was voted the #1 beach in the United States in 2012, and Blacks Beach is one of the world’s largest naturist beaches (a naturist beach is where people are allowed to wear only their birthday suits).

There also are some areas of the coastline that are inaccessible to all but the bravest of the brave (some would say stupidest of the stupid), comprising sandstone bluffs and high, steep cliffs.

One such area is Sunset Cliffs where the sandstone bluffs slowly are eroding away from the constant pounding of the waves.

If there’s a low tide, you can often see sandstone arches like this one:

That arch is surrounded by a fence and is just feet away from a well-used road and multi-million-dollar homes. Eventually it will collapse, possibly taking parts of a road and home with it.

Another arch I saw was this one:

I wanted to get closer to that arch but that’s one of those stupidest-of-the-stupid areas in my humble opinion. However, I was up to the task. I held my camera up to my eye and zoomed in on the arch:

I still wanted to get closer, though, and with some nimbleness in plopping my butt in the office chair and magically touching some of the keys on the keyboard, when I zoomed in, I made a startling discovery. There are two arches!

The discoveries one can make by using Photoshop. My discovery made me feel like Christopher Columbus when he discovered the New World……………..well, maybe not, but I still had fun!

Here’s looking at you! (Let’s see if anyone understands…………….)

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Looking for real estate services in San Diego County?
I can highly recommend
James Frimmer, Realtor
Century 21 Award, BRE #01458572

If you’re looking for a home inspector,
I recommend Russel Ray — that’s me!

Blah pictures don’t have to stay blah

As I’ve been cleaning and rearranging the home these past 24 days, I have found things that I never knew I had….

….such as postcards, Christmas cards, birthday cards, thank-you cards, all unused…. all from a past where I used to send out cards like it was the last day of Earth.

Now we have e-Cards, email…. everything except cards that actually arrive in a mailbox.

That, however, didn’t prevent me from taking some pictures that otherwise had flaws in them, modify them, and create some cards, mostly to put my Photoshop CC skills to the test.

One card that I particularly like started with this photograph:

The wall art is pretty cool but the picture itself needs some work. It’s underexposed, has contrast and clarity issues, is tilting backwards, and simply is a blah picture.

First, I solved the tilting problem using Perspective Crop and then lightened the shadows so the fish were better seen. That also lightened the darker areas, which I think is good, because the shadows were overshadowing (so to speak) the fish.

Then I realized that whomever installed the artwork should have centered it within the wall boards. Notice that the right side has a small slice of board? The fishies should swim over to the left a couple of inches or so….

I tried working with that image but the board slice was really bugging me.

The texture of the boards was bugging me, too. I mean, do fish swim on lumber?

There are several ways to resolve these issues but I thought the easiest thing to do would be to remove the boards.

Using the Magic Wand and a lot of work at high magnifications, I selected the boards I wanted to remove and then inverted my selection. I did that because I didn’t really want to remove the boards. What I wanted to do was to remove the fish from the boards. In other words, I needed to select what I wanted to keep rather than what I wanted to remove.

I highlighted the boards, though, because they were easy to highlight, all of them being the same basic light gray. Inverting the selection then gave me just the fish, fishing line, and shadows. I then saved those to continue to work on them.

It took me a while to get the shadows just the way I wanted them. The final product looks like this:

One fish has escaped from the fishing line. Do you see it?

I can leave those fish on a white background or change the background to another color, such as blue for water. Or I can apply filters to them; this is one of my favorites:

Now that I can cut out pieces of pictures, oh the possibilities are endless as to what I can accomplish. I might never have a real picture in my blog again………..lol

In recognition of the start of another football season:

Give me a P!

P!

Give me an H!

H!

Give me an O!

O!

Give me a T!

T!

Give me an O!

O!

Give me an S!

S!

Give me an H!

H!

Give me a third O!

O!

Give me two P’s!

P!

P!

Give me an E!

E!

Give me a D!

D!

What does it spell?

Photoshopped!

Yeaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa Photoshop!

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Looking for real estate services in San Diego County?
I can highly recommend
James Frimmer, Realtor
Century 21 Award, BRE #01458572

If you’re looking for a home inspector,
I recommend Russel Ray — that’s me!