Kaleidoscope

When I talk about my pictures I often mention that I want to hang them on the wall. I want them to be worthy of taking the time to frame them and look at them daily. When I say things like that I have pictures of the Smokey Mountains, the beach, or Yellowstone in my mind. However, the effect I played with has turned some plain pictures into some cool abstract art.

The first picture I did this with is of the red doors on St. Johns Lutheran Church downtown. The doors have always stood out to me so I thought I would take a picture. Initially I was going to try to remove the silver signs from the door. That turned out to be a big failure so I kept trying other effects. Below is the original picture.



I used the kaleidoscope effect and thought the results were neato.



Since the red doors turned out so cool I tried it on a picture of my backyard.



If you look really closely you can see the trees on the “arms” of the kaleidoscope.



The last picture I did this to was the macro picture of the purple flower.





All in all I think this a really cool effect.

My Backyard

I really enjoy our yard. There is nothing fancy about it but it relaxing to look at our yard after being cooped up all winter. I took a picture of our backyard as sunset. I tried to use the rule of thirds using the horizon and the tree but I’m not sure how well I did. I probably could have cropped the picture to make it a bit better.



Under the Effects menu is a submenu of Art Media Effects. I used the colored chalk effect for this picture. I think it makes the picture more interesting. Some of the other art media effects are pencil, colored pencil, and charcoal.

More 801

I was driving down Grand Avenue in downtown Des Moines heading west when I had to stop at a stop light and had the thought to take a picture. I rolled down the window stuck my arm out the window and snapped a picture of the tallest building in our great state. I can only imagine what the other drivers were thinking of me. Here is the picture that I took.



I didn't really have any idea what to do with this picture. I did a lot of experimenting. Here are a few of the results that I liked enough to save. This picture I used the Flood Fill tool and colored some parts of the building.



Then I found this Posterize effect and I liked the result better than the Flood Fill tool. When using the Flood Fill I got to choose what colors I wanted to use and where I wanted to use them. With the posterize effect you select it and the photo is edited.

Fill Flash

Spring is coming! I know this because last night I was out on the deck and I heard birds singing. It made me so happy. Anyhow, while I was on the deck I snapped a few pictures off to the north. Most of this view is my neighbors yard, the field behind his house, and the tree line by the creek. I actually saw some blue sky so I wanted to capture it in my picture.

I wrote a research paper about landscape photography and one of the “rules” I learned was the rule of thirds. I tried to use it when I took this picture - two-thirds sky and one-third land.



When I brought the picture up on my computer, it was a bit dark. It was evening so maybe it was too dark to take a picture beyond what my flash range. In the adjust menu of Paint Shop Pro is a Fill Flash feature that adds flash to the picture. I think it helped this picture out quite a bit. It brightened the grass and the sky. It was also a quick push of a button to do. I like how many of these features can improve a picture so quickly and easily.

Darkness

I went into work EARLY one day this past week. I decided to snap a picture of 801 Grand in the dark. The picture is below. It is pretty dark and really not a good picture.



There is a setting on my camera for darker picture. The symbol is a moon. Probably because of the cool moon rises that people (like me) always want to take a pictures of. This setting slows down the shutter speed. I took another picture of 801 Grand using this setting. The result is a really blurry picture but it is lighter.



I took another picture with this setting and it is better but I think a tripod is a necessity for this setting.

Positive....Um, I mean Negative

I went out to Yellow Banks Park and took this picture of the landscape. When I opened it up I thought it was a pretty cool picture and played around with different ways to edit it. However, it is a very gray picture. When I turned it black and white you could hardly see a change. Most of the effects I use are under the Adjust or Effects menu. While playing around I opened the image menu. I clicked the “Negative image” and got the result below. I like the change, especially the top of the tree against the sky and the bottom third of the picture. I think the middle of the picture, in both versions, gets muddled.



I added the "negative" picture frame at the end to finish it off and because I thought it was clever.

Playing with Color

I took a picture of some shadows of a tree. The picture is quite simple with the shadows on the snow. One of the menus is Hue and Saturation. The option I used to edit this picture is the Hue Map. There are 10 color slides that can be adjusted to change the hue of the picture. I played around with it quite a bit and in my picture in changed the color of the shadows. I like the effect. I did this twice. One of the pictures I edited to have purple shadows and the other is brownish.

Graphic Rocks

I decided to take a picture of the rock wall outside our basement. It is on the north side of the house so there isn’t much sun these days. It is just a picture of a few boulders with snow on them. Nothing I would normally take a picture of but I thought it may be interesting to see what I could do with it using some effects. The first picture is below. I attempted to use a lot of different effects and I lot of them evened out the color and texture. In the geometric effects menu (which is where I found the horizontal and vertical perspective) there is a pentagon option. I used that with a wrap edge. I like the results. What do you think?

Color Balance

This post is a basic study in Color Balance. In PSP there is an option called Color Balance. You have a slide that you can move from cool to warm. To demonstrate the difference I took a picture of a snow bank and edited it once with the slide halfway on the warm side and then edited another halfway on the cold side. I thought a snow picture would show the effect clearly since most of the picture is white. This effect could be used for slight adjustments to a picture or more significantly, as I have here, for a more artistic effect.




Most of the time involved with this feature was spent experimenting with the settings. It doesn't take too long to apply.

Picture Frames

The snow is melting and 95% of Iowa rejoices. Today’s picture is of the creek that goes through my front yard. You are getting a pretty good idea of the views from my house and neighborhood and I’m sure there will be more to come. I like this picture how it is, so I decided to use the picture frame feature in PSP. There are a lot of different picture frame options but I chose 3 to show you here.

Here is the original picture.



Here I used the "oval" picture frame.



Here is one of my favorite frames. It is called transparent.



This frame is called paintbrush.



The frame are really easy to add. There is a large variety and I think they can jazz up a picture quite a bit.

Macro

Have you ever wanted to take a picture of a flower or a bug? You get really close to the subject and take the picture and it turns out blurry. So you keep moving the camera back and end up quitting in frustration. The Macro mode is the answer to this issue. This mode allows a close up picture to be taken. On my camera the symbol for the Macro mode is a flower and all I had to do is press the button to turn it on and off. Below is a picture of a flower without the macro and then without changing distances I turned the Macro on and took another picture.





The differences are amazing. If you would like to see more pictures taken with Macro I found a blog (http://lisaschaos.com) that has a blog carnival each Monday called Macro Monday. There are some really cool pictures over there and I encourage you to check them out.

On a side note - Happy 5th Birthday Robby!