I swear I’ve become obsessed with photography since I had my son. I love taking his picture. After I realized how much I loved it, I began to look for other things to photograph as well. What I discovered is everything is cooler in black in white. Not all the time, but most of it. I love the way the shadows can highlight certain aspects. Just by removing the color from the photograph you can really see the subject.
For example, I did a shot of him sitting in some green feathers for St. Patrick’s Day. Those images turned out great, but when I cropped the image and removed the color I got some truly amazing shots. In one shot I had a close up of his feet sticking out from these bright green fake feathers. Well…in color you could tell they were fake and his feet kind of got lost in the midst of the fluff. When I removed the color the feathers did the opposite. Instead of hiding those cute little toes (is there anything cuter than baby feet?) they accentuated them. It was absolutely adorable! (Yes, I’m biased..but I got other opinions and everyone agreed)
How did I do this? Well my camera does have a black and white setting but I never remember to use it. Instead I use my photo software (I have several different kinds depending on what I want to do). It’s easier and it allows me to click away without having to worry about even more settings, ya know?
Have you found that you tend to prefer black and white baby pictures over those with full color?
Photo Credit Lou & Magoo
June 26th, 2009 by birdievogel | Posted in Photo Software, Techniques | Comments (0)
I have always liked photography. I use to take pictures as a child with my old fashioned (you know, the kind with film) camera. It was lots of fun and I still have boxes of pictures from when I was a kid. The problem with film is that unless you are waaaay more experienced than I was/am you can’t edit your pictures.
This is where Corel Paint Shop Pro comes in. I bought this program after I’d had several digital cameras and had played with some of the free editing software that came with one of those cameras. You could say that I became hooked on photo editing. The one problem with Paint Shop is that it does take a lot of memory. The more I’ve used it the slower it has become. Now granted I do a lot of editing. I mean if you can turn your images into something from the past, or a kaleidoscope image, or a painting….why not do it? And that’s just some of the things I like to do with my pictures.
Unfortunately all of that editing, tweeking, and deleting has caused my hard drive to become very fragmented. The more fragmented my computer got the slower the program ran. I swear it was taking five minutes just to wait for all of the pictures to load. I know, I know. Five minutes in the grand scheme of things really isn’t that long and it is nothing compared to the time it would take to modify pictures the old fashioned way but dang. I’m a material girl, ya know? I want it my way right away. I’m impatient to the extreme.
What’s a patience challenged girl to do? Defrag regularly, of course. Now that I defrag often I’ve noticed and increase in the speed of Paint Shop Pro, which makes me one happy camper.
Do you like to play with photo editing software? Have you found the process gets slower and slower? What have you done to speed things back up?
Photo Credit: Velo City
May 29th, 2009 by birdievogel | Posted in Photo Software | Comments (0)
I’m a total camera junkie. I love to take pictures, lots and lots of pictures. Artistic pictures, family pictures, fun pictures…pretty much anything within my line of sight is fair game. I also like to play with the pictures after I’ve taken them. Heck, that’s the best part! Luckily I have a fairly new computer that has lots of memory and moves at the speed of light (yeah, not really but it is fast). That means I can successfully use pretty much any photo editing software on the market. But what about people with older or slower computers? Or both. Like my Aunt.
She’s always loved photography. To give you an idea of how long she’s been taking pictures, she has some great shots of her husband as he was getting ready to get on his ship to be deployed oversees during WWII. Yeah. She’s old school. Well now that she’s seen the fun of digital photography she is getting interested in digital photo editing as well. The only problem (well it would be a problem for someone as spoiled as me) is that her computer is really slow. We’re talking horse and buggy slow.
So what did I suggest? Well her very cool printer, Kodak if you were wondering, came with some photo editing software that is pretty nifty. As a matter of fact it is what got me started originally. It has some great basic features without being overwhelming or overly complicated. You can change the tint/colors and do a few special effects but nothing with layering and vectors. Works really well for her and she is happy. Therefore, my suggestion for photo editing software for slower computers is the software that comes with your camera or photo printer (doesn’t have to be Kodak, but that’s what I’m familiar with). Of course, I also suggest deleting pictures you don’t really like so that you don’t use up memory with pictures you won’t use because wow are picture files huge. After all of that deleting, adding, editing, and deleting again you know her hard drive (anyone’s really) gets fragmented so I also recommend frequent defragmentation.
What photo editing software do you like for slower computers? If there is something with more bells and whistles that won’t make her computer slow to a crawl I’d love to hear about it!
Photo Credit Boston Public Library
May 29th, 2009 by birdievogel | Posted in Photo Software | Comments (0)
I have my little photo editing setup for my computer running like clockwork. I have everything down to a science even. I have specific files for like photographs, a defragmentation routine, favorite photo editing software. The whole nine. I even have a camera I’m in love with.
I have something of a reputation with friends and family for being pretty handy with a camera. That’s totally fine with me because I really do love to take pictures. I’ve taken pictures of my little brother and sister (teenagers) that everyone in the family loved. I took pictures of him and his date for prom which both families loved. I’ve taken baby pictures for friends, and of course baby pictures for me. Landscapes, portraits, stills, abstract…you name it I’ll take a picture of it (well, within reason). Then I edit them and, if I do say so myself, they look pretty darn stunning.
Now here is the bad part. People think I just point click and print. That it’s all in the shot. Uhm…not so much. I have a great camera, cool editing software, and tons of patience to get the pictures to look just right. I tweek without making it obvious and make people and places look like themselves except better. Why is this a problem? Because people (family) want it instantly. My dad wanted some pictures of his grandson (aww, they are sooo cute together). So he had us come over and gave me his camera and he wanted me to take the pictures and upload them to his computer. . . and he wanted them to look as good as the ones I usually give him. You know…the ones I spend hours on.
Riiiiight. So my dad has a starter camera and an older computer and no editing software. Oh my. So I start to load the pictures onto the computer, after all I am capable of taking good shots, regardless of the equipment. I only wanted to upload a few pictures so I could put them on his desktop (I like to make it easy for him) but oh no. Nothing simple. His computer was so slow it was taking ages to upload a single picture so I canceled the upload and started to defrag his computer. ::sigh:: I don’t know if the thing had ever been defragmented before, because the time estimate was in the hours. Yeah. I explained the upload would have to wait.
Do you have any nightmare stories involving photography and a fragmented hard drive? Please share so I won’t feel so alone.
Photo Credit Eurleif
May 29th, 2009 by birdievogel | Posted in Photo Software | Comments (0)
Not only do I like to take pictures of all sorts of things but I also like to edit them for numerous reasons. I like to make photo cards, calendars, and well…pretty much anything you can put a photograph on. I also like to edit graphics and photographs for my various websites. For most of my websites I use cartoons I buy from other people and then edit them to better fit my website or blog. I swear every time I sit down to edit I’m like a dog with a new toy.
The thing about editing graphics is, those files are huge. When you start playing around with them they get even bigger. For instance I may change the color of an object, or add two graphics together, or add text to the background. There are any number of things you can do to a photograph or a graphic to customize it. Heck sometimes the finished product isn’t even recognizable from the original image. The thing about all of this customization through editing is that it really makes a mess of your memory. Computer memory that is…although sometimes I think it makes of mess of my personal memory. Like when I could swear I had just changed something on an image only to realize I hadn’t done it (or hadn’t saved it). Anyway. After a few hours of playing with a large file I find that my editing software sometimes slows down. Maybe it wouldn’t be noticeable to everyone, but it bugs me.
What are the solutions to this annoyance? Well first I make sure I delete any files that I’m not going to use. You know…changes I made that I decided weren’t good enough. Then I make sure I defrag my hard drive every few hours (if I’m really smokin’ on the editing) or at the end of the day, if I was just moderately grooving. I know it may seem excessive, but really, I edit a lot and it seems to improve the speed at which changes are saved and additional images are pulled up.
Have you found defragmenting your computer helps to make photo editing easier and quicker?
Photo Credit: Kunta Tokyo’s
May 29th, 2009 by birdievogel | Posted in Photo Software | Comments (0)
When I had to get serious about editing photographs I had to decide what photo editing software to use. I finally narrowed it down between Photoshop and Paint Shop Pro. The names are so similar it can be confusing.
What it comes down to, though, is that Photoshop is more expensive and has more bells and whistles. Of course with all of those bells and whistles you (or at least I) would be tempted to edit each picture into a dozen different editions, which would completely mess with my available memory. And because I’m a bit fickle I’d end up deleting half of them and fragmenting my hard drive to billions of little pieces. Kind of like a broken mirror. Ahh.. the perils of too many editing options. So for those of you who are hard core, get Photoshop.
For those of you who are just starting out, however, Paint Shop Pro is perfectly adequate. There are enough bells and whistles to keep you plenty occupied. I spend hours editing a batch of photographs just about every time I open the program. Once I master everything and realize that there are things I want to do that the program won’t allow me to, I might upgrade. But for now, as a beginner and hobbyist, I really enjoy Paint Shop Pro. It allows me to change the texture of an image, change colors within the image, clone items from an image, glam up portraits, and make photographs look like they were taken in the late 1800s. All very cool effects and that’s not even half of what it can do.
I suppose it comes down to personal preference and what you are going to be doing with the software. Which photo editing software did you choose? What were the reasons behind your choice? Are you happy with the product you chose or do you think you’ll end up going back and getting something else eventually?
Photo Credit Kevin Gessner
May 29th, 2009 by birdievogel | Posted in Photo Software | Comments (0)
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