This is a great article about a common problem, in fact I found it when I went on the net looking for, well, ways to use up the zucchini.
http://www.wisebread.com/gadzukes-10-ways-to-use-up-your-zucchini-bounty
And now ladies and gentlemen, the grand Finale. Four pictures into one!! An additional two or three that I just took little bits from, and the earlier Tongue Affliction picture. Of course MY camera decides not to work at all, so one of the residents took these pictures, and most of them were blurry. There was a lot of blend-testing, and it was minimally effective, but it was mainly cutting, pasting, and blurring.
First we start with the happiest resident ever. It was a âTrip to New Yorkâ [props to Brenda at Bonham Nursing in Stillwater, sheâs a pistol, and smart as a whip], and so this resident has BOTH a âfeather in her capâ and an American Flag.
Then there was the rest of the audience, which had to be attached to the happy resident.
Then there was Sal, bless him, he even got up and danced but of course we didnât get a picture of that! But we did get him clappinâ along. Youâll notice I flipped him.
The worst and most time consuming part of this was making the colors match. Itâs surprising how some pictures come out all in yellows and some pictures are all in blues. Cold and warm colors, donâtcha know.
Layer levels can be adjusted, it makes a new layer and adjusts the hue, saturation, luminosity, and any other attribute you can think of. This required a lot of playing around and now that Iâm getting more advanced there isnât a lot on the web to help me. Youâll be surprised to hear, there are many minimally gifted people who randomly post YouTube videos telling you nothing you really want to know. Besides, as one of my fellow students who is a graphic design MAJOR told me, tutorials are fine but you really donât learn until you fool around with it. What she didnât say is I would waste HOURS and DAYS on it! One of the files I saved was called âfeetsâ because that one lady with the red-striped socks, her feet took literally HOURS to position properly. And if you look close, they really arenât. I also spent a lot of time on that 60âs era floor, since the colors didnât always match. I found out the danger of cutting and pasting ad infinitum, because every time you paste something it creates a layer. I think 35 layers is too many, but I was afraid to âflattenâ them all because then theyâd be lost. Guess it depends on how left-brain of a thinker you are!
The only thing I took from this picture, to the left, was the copier or whatever it is on the right.
The main thing that is different from the old way of doing things [mainly with an exacto-knife] is that you CAN adjust the colors, hue, saturation, luminosity, darkness, brightness, contrast to make pictures look like they were taken at the same time.
And what, exactly, did I learn? That there are many, many hours in the day that the youth of our nation can fritter away on the Internet. That if you think our politicians have more ways than ever to âspinâ themselves and their actions, you are right. That we are all children of advertising and therefore donât believe everything we see, even if it looks really, really good.
I still need 2 more pictures to complete my final project. However the one that I already posted was the only, well, acceptable one. But the solution is part and parcel of âPhotoshopââ¦just get an image off the Internet, and stick yourself in! I already knew how to do this from that aforementioned nice young man.
Easier said than done. Thereâs a finite amount of pictures of me, and it took a long long time to find one I would fit in to. Even then I had to flip it horizontally (under the âImageâ menu). There were other pictures but they were the wrong colorâ¦and yes, you can change thatâ¦or taken at facilities in Japan. I have been doing this performing at facilities thing for about 20 years and in all that time I have seen MAYBE two or three people of Asian descent. So those pics were out, too. This was the only one that even remotely fit, it's from Florida but it couldnât be helped. (How do I know itâs Florida? Well I donât, but I know damn well the elderly never EVER wear shoes like that, around here even if itâs 120 degrees). I had to cut myself out of the picture, trim my horrible neck area, then insert myself into the now-horizontally flipped picture. I actually succeeded in covering up dancer #2....dancer #1 just got cropped right out entirely.
I am really not satisfed with this pictureâ¦try & guess whyâ¦but even the Internet could not help me here. My friend Tyler says I should put someone, preferably creepy, at that window to provide the audience with a reason why theyâre looking there, and not at me! I did take a couple of audience members from behind me, since they were kinda looking in my direction, and placed them up front next to the guy with the powder blue shirt. That's why that table looks so crowded.
By the way if youâre going to flip a picture make sure thereâs nothing written visible because it will appear backwards. This will make your viewers think you live in Bizzaro world. Which I assuredly do.
Here is photoshop project number three. On Monday I played a gig at a facility in Wilkes Barre. I had my friend come and take pictures of me, and the audience. Unfortunately she was in a hurry, that has to be the only reason why there was no good picture of me with the audience. In fact there were only 3 pictures of me, each one was worse than the one before it. So I chose this one, with the tongue affliction. And I chose this audience picture, believing I could stick myself into the audience picture and make âem look like they were actually enjoying the performance. I needed to cut and paste myself out of this one, itâs actually pretty easy, like I did with the garlic heads. Resizing is the biggest pain about this, because at first I looked like the Giant 50 foot woman playing my keyboard.
And speaking of my keyboard, that was really hard, because the right side of it got cut off in the Tongue Afflication picture, so I kind of had to create more keyboard with the lasso tool. I must have cut out 100 images, at first I couldnât get it to copy right, then it did but it never fit in once I moved my little copy over to the side of the keyboard. Youâll note it doesnât really look right even now, but itâll do. And then I had to literally turn frowns upside down. That was another Youtube trip, and some nice young man in Australia or New Zealand revealed to me âtransformâ under the âeditâ menu. Voila! Some of the frowns I literally turned upside down, but most of them I just took a sample of the corner and ârotatedâ âem a bit. Then the ubiquitous Blur tool, to make them fit in. I finally learned how to âLiquifyâ, itâs under âFilterâ and gently pushes things in. I wish there was some kind of tool like this in Life (yeah, itâs called dieting) but it took me several days to learn how to use it. Thereâs some kind of mesh underneath the picture and it compresses just those tiny squares of pixels. Another nice young man (how come theyâre always guys) on YouTube called it How To Make Fat People Skinny. Ha!
Hey folks! I grew some garlicâplanted it last October, dug it up this weekâand I took some pictures of it hanging up to dry, to show you. Then I got an idea, a terrible, awful idea. And here it is. How did I do this evil deed, you may ask?
Simple. I photoshopped the heads ontoâ¦the heads!!! And yes, âphotoshopâ is a verb. I tried the âclone stamp toolâ since I figured thatâs how you would copy something and paste it onto something else. Not so. I finally gave up after literally HOURS of trying to figure it out and put âhow to photoshop someone into a pictureâ into the search engine, and voila!! Youtube has a tutorial on every thing a human being can do, including this. The nice sounding young man taught me how to copy and paste, resizing the photos as you go, and it couldnât be simpler. First you take the âlassoâ tool and cut the thing out you want to put somewhere. Then it will acquire what my professor calls the âmarching antsâ around just that part of the image youâve drawn around. Hit edit, then copy, and go to the garlic picture, and hit paste! If it doesnât fit, resize the original image, under âimage sizeâ and paste again.
Stupid Dan had red-eye in his picture, because no picture exists of him taken anywhere else but a bar. So THAT was another hour, because despite the fact that my version of photoshop, CS2, is supposed to have a âred eye toolâ, it doesnât. Or, at least I couldnât find it. So I gave up and found another picture of him. Notice how heâs kind of transparent while the rest of us are solid. I used the âpolygonalâ lasso tool on him, and the regular lasso tool on all the rest. Hm.
Why is my head the biggest? Because itâs my picture. I call it "GarlicGuideHeads".
OK folks hereâs the new improved picture. I used the âAuto Levelsâ since Iâm sure the computer knows better than I do what the picture should look like. Used the âspot healing toolâ on the neck, makes me look 15 years younger, donâtcha think? Course if I WAS 15 years younger I'd be illegal.
More pics next week.
Iâm taking a Media Technology class this summer, and my Final project is to learn Photoshop. Perfect for a woman of myâ¦talents (and by talents I mean age}. I had a mini-whirlwind introduction from the professor teaching the courseâ¦stupidly, I chose something he is GREAT at. Memo to selfâ¦next time choose something he knows nothing about!
Anyway YOU, dear reader, are going to learn along with me. So here we go. To the left of the actual working area is the TOOLBAR, this is your God. Lookit all the stuff you can do! OK, so I don't know what half of it means. But I like the sound of "blur", "spot healing" and "slice." Sounds more like plastic surgery! I actually photoshopped this image--the words in that turquoise color are the ones I put in there. I tried to make the words black but gave up out of annoyance. I feel that this will happen often during my learning experience. The tool thingies with no word next to them, means I really didn't understand what it does so I left it blank.
Now hereâs the first picture Iâm gonna mess with. Yes, yes, I know, never take a picture with someone 30 years younger than yourself. Oh well. First thing to do is get that neck taken care of. Which tool, blur, stamp, spot healing? Tried the clone stamp toolâ¦thatâs supposed to take something from somewhere else, copy it, and put it where you tell it to. Didnât work, neck still awful. This is gonna take a long, long time.  Iâll post the results in ten years when I figure this thing out.
By the way his name is Shane and he can really shred on guitar! Come see us, Sept 18, itâll be a Rock Mass at Gate of Heaven church in Dallas. And staytooned for the new, improved pic, once I get finished with it!
Bruce has released the text of his eulogy for Clarence Clemons he delivered on June 21st at his funeral in West Palm Beach. Here's the link...http://www.rollingstone.com/music/news/bruce-springsteens-eulogy-for-clarence-clemons-20110629
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