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!