Long-time readers know that I love photography, and I love the digital photograph editing programs, especially Photoshop.
I also enjoy taking my photographs into Photoshop and messing them up so that they no longer look like photographs.
Here’s a selection of messed up cactus and succulent photographs from yesterday:
The Pacific Photographic Society (PPS) to which I belong is a Meetup group.
That’s how I found out about it.
After each event—and we have billions and billions of events!—each event attendee is allowed to upload no more than ten photos to our Meetup photo album for that event.
Everyone browses the pictures and sometimes comments.
Along with the picture of Cleo (see this post), this picture got the most comments:
The owner of the garden, herself an extremely good photographer with equipment far superior to mine, and a member of PPS, had this to say:
“This is an interesting interpretation of this subject. I like what you have done with the texture.”
I felt honored.
The original picture was all drab, some of it having to do with it being a dull, drab, overcast, gray, rainy day. However, I have discovered that within those dull, drab, 
gray colors are many other colors wanting to get out. Photoshop to the rescue!
As my wise old grandmother (picture ►) would say:
“What comes out of the camera is just the basics to start with.”
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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!
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Many years ago when I was living in College Station, Texas, I had a desktop publishing company. I created newsletters, flyers and such for companies, as well as work for students and teachers at Texas A&M University. That required that I have the latest and greatest software, and I had Photoshop, Photo-Paint, CorelDRAW, and many others. The three named were my favorites, though.
When I disappeared from Texas in 1993 and reappeared in San Diego, I no longer had a need for them. I still don’t have a need for them, but my wants are pretty strong. So once I found Eric Cooper to catalog my 73,000 photos for me, I went off and bought Photoshop CS6, Lightroom 4, Photo-Paint X6, PaintShop Pro X4, and CorelDRAW X5. I was comfortable with Adobe and Corel, so I went with their programs rather than the free ones like Picnik (now gone; see!), Picassa, Gimp, etc.
Each day I study those five programs to learn something new. I’ve already studied CorelDRAW this morning and am having just way too much fun. I discovered the Lens Effects, among which are Fish Eye, Heat Map, Magnify, and Custom Color Map, my four favorites out of the many pre-set lens effects. I can see them being very useful in my photography and blogging.
Whenever I’m playing around and learning, I always use Zoey the Cool Cat, and she came in very handy this morning. Here’s what I did, very easily, using the Custom Color Map lens effect in CorelDRAW X5:
Zoey the Cool Cat might have missed the Summer of Love, but now she knows what it was like. 🙂
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As I cruise around WordPress blogs, I notice that most of the photography blogs are titled something like “John Doe Photography.” You’ll notice that I’m not. I’m Russel Ray Photos. There’s a reason for that.
Although I try to take the best photos I can, I have never been about photography perfection even though I’ve always had a nice 35mm SLR camera (Canon A-1) or digital SLR (Canon Rebel XSi and Canon 550D). You might occasionally find me using an old picture that can basically be called a snapshot because that’s what it was then, and is now.
Many full moons ago (about 240 of them) I had a need for things like scanners, Photoshop (I bought the first version and upgraded religiously through version 8), Paint Shop, Corel Photo-Paint, etc. I sold that business in 1993 when I moved from College Station, Texas, to San Diego.
Now that my energy is slowing down — i.e., I can’t play tennis, basketball, or volleyball anymore — I’m trying to get back to digital photo editing because it is a lot of fun. Until I get to layers and masks. The result of layers and masks is fun, but the technical part can be quite tedious. Don’t tell me to check out the YouTube tutorials because they pretty well…. I’ll just leave it at that since this is a family blog.
A couple of weeks ago I went to a local seminar — cost me $16 for 90 minutes — that was all about Photoshop layers and masks. It was the most useful seminar I’ve been to. I’m still having trouble with layers and masks, but that will be resolved with practice.
Of course, my first (successful) attempt at using Photoshop layers and masks obviously starred Zoey the Cool Cat. Here’s the result:
That seminar did show me the secrets to working with Photoshop layers and masks, and the secrets are the lasso tool, the brush tool, the magic wand tool, and knowing when to use Alt + left mouse click. I’m using Photoshop CS6 Beta, but they also work in Photoshop CS5 (which I also have) and, according to the seminar leader, Photoshop CS4. Beyond that I don’t know. As I get more experienced with this really complicated stuff, I’ll do some static tutorials for those who, like me, despise video tutorials.
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