Digital discoveries

Christy Hydeck is an artist I met on Facebook recently and I've been admiring her art ever since, especially her wonderfully dreamy landscape photographs. Imagine my surprise when, low and behold, I came across a magazine at the library called "Cloth, Paper, Scissors" and there was an article by Christy in it. I know I'm kind of sheltered down under in Florida, but apparently many artists are familiar with her and her work (I really need to get out more often!) She gave tips on how she gets that dream-like quality in her photographs and I've been cogitating about it ever since. In the process, I ran across another site with a wealth of tutorials on photo editing. A lot of the tutorials are for Photoshop but you can apply them to other editing software, like my favorite Paint Shop Pro, with a few tweaks. Here's my learning experiment for the day utilizing "vintaging" (is that a word?) and automated actions. I'm not sure why I picked this image but discovered after the fact that the owl was linked with the goddess Athena in ancient Greece who was associated with the arts and wisdom (might be a subconscious wish here). So much fun and so much to learn.

Paint Shop Pro exploration goes on

OM, digitally enhanced photo and painting

I took a picture of the Buddha statue Jerry gave me for Christmas and added a boring acrylic painting as a background, along with some digital enhancement. Getting into the important layer functions, I found that Paint Shop didn't seem as intuitive to work with as Photoshop (I really miss those "eyes" in the layer function to turn them on and off) and it seems like you have to go through several additional steps to magnify and add layer masks. I'm certainly not a professional when it comes to using either of these programs, but I'm enjoying discovering what Paint Shop can do and it's years ahead of my old version of Photoshop 4.0. Perhaps the latest version corrects some of these "deficiencies." It's a very small price to upgrade--I think $39. As long as my new computer beckons with all its mysteries, it's going to be hard to fit "real" painting into my day.

Life goes on without Photoshop

Grady attacking my camera strap

I've been playing around today with the software my sister gave me, Paint Shop Pro. Knowing how I was going through withdrawals since my new computer wouldn't run my ancient version of Photoshop, she said she'd mail me this program to try out. She had bought Photoshop CS3 last year to use in her web design business and didn't need Paint Shop any longer. I must say--I love this program!! In a lot of ways it reminds me of Photoshop, but it seems to have a lot of other features Photoshop lacks (or maybe they weren't there on my old version.) I'll still have to explore a lot, but I like the drop shadows idea (if I can figure out how to do it) and this curling edge thingy I put on this picture of Grady. Who says you have to go broke to get a good picture editing program?