Explore New Worlds
with Paint Shop Pro 8 or 9

Week Three

This week was another photo lesson and the review was very helpful. I used the photo supplied to crop and resize and then enhance. From an artistic viewpoint I liked the large tree as a frame for the scene as well as the curve in the path and cropped it that way.

The next part of the lesson is about the only thing I really hate to do. I'm not good with small detailed things and using the clone brush to get rid of fences isn't something that I take easily to. Did the camel and then a little bit on the ostrich but I'm afraid I lost patience with it and quit.

I had a little fun with the people cloning. I had tried this same picture last year and ended up with a ghost for some reason so I tried again and, although the busy background made it difficult to do a perfect job, I did get a duplicate of the figure. I tried another one with a composite I made to test this out and I guess that's cheating because the figure was on a different layer and, therefore, the background didn't come into play at all.

Next were the red eye correction pictures. These are really neat and the tool does such a fabulous job. I did some further correction on the girl's picture including some cloning on the background and a soft focus to lose some of her wrinkles.

The last is fun with effects. If I had a favorite in PSP it would be working with these filters. There are so many varieties and you never know what's going to come around the corner. I'm showing my original picture and then the several filters I tried.

For Extra Credit I chose a picture of my house after a snowstorm and used these tools. First the straighten tool which I tried twice. First I thought I should straighten the roof line but that didn't do it so, instead straightened the base of the house. I then used automatic color balance to show the color of the siding. I then promoted the background layer, selected the sky deleted it and added a layer behind it with one of the sky photos from my collection. I didn't think there was enough contrast so I adjusted the color balance with 0 levels all across and midtone tone balance and preserve luminance checked. The skies are always so grey here and this makes me think of a day after a storm other places I have lived. It was a bit hairy replacing the top of the tree. I had copied the image before I deleted the sky so I went back to that image and cloned the tree top and put it on the new picture. The background was too white so I went back and put a transparent fill on the picture and then cloned it over. The branches came out too light so I used the darken tool to bring them out a bit. Overall it wasn't that successful but may not be too noticeable if you didn't know it was there. This was fun and rewarding as well.

All in all another great week for learning. Now I just have to remember to use it although, since working with the graphics art part of PSP, I haven't done as much with my photos. Thanks once again.