Melissa Popping Out

Tonight I played with a technique called “Popping Out of a Photo.”   I took a somewhat ordinary photo

and turned it into something interesting:

This is the same photo I made interesting by tilting it a bit.  I got this technique from the book, Photoshop CS Down and Dirty Tricks by Scott Kelby.

Bud Parker

Tonight I took a picture from yesterdays post and photoshopped it a bit.  I kept Mike in color and turned the background into black and white.  Sort of reminds me of the movie Pleasantville.  Bud Parker was the name of the Tobey Maguire character in Pleasantville.

Michael Is Blogging!

I talked Micheal into trying out blogging his freshman experiences at EKU.  Let’s see how long he lasts.

Here is his blog:  Mike's Blog  

In order to do it, I promised to give him my SD400 camera so he could take pictures to post.  I suspect he will get bored and I will get the camera back soon.  But if not, Canon came out with a couple of new Elph’s, the SD450 and SD550.  I will probably get the SD550 just because my brother got a SD500 to one-up my SD400 so it is my turn and I need to one-up him.

 

Lexington Legends

Last night Melissa and I went to see the Lexington Legends baseball team play.  The game was suppose to start at 6pm.  It was rain delayed for 2 hours.  Melissa and I showed up at 8pm and there were plenty of seats. We could just walk right in since the ticket takers had already left.  Free night at the game — woot!

when we first got there — I fell in love!   Check out that lens!  Woo boy.   Melissa cringed when she saw that lens.  She figures that one of those will be in the house soon   Even though it said Nikon on the plastic, I think that is a Canon hiding under there due to its distinctive white color. 

Actually, we went to the game to see Michael work at the game. 

Mike is part of the Mac Attack squad.  What they do is provide entertainment whenever there is a stop in the action — mostly when the teams switch up on the field.  It was a hard time keeping track of Micheal as he was all over the stadium.  When he wasn’t on the field, he was interacting with the fans.

Or he was waiting for a break in the action and talking with fellow staff members.  Mike sees me taking his photo and then tells his coworker who hams it up for the camera and then gets Mike to join in.

Of course there was baseball going on….   I tried pretty hard to get a bat-on-ball picture, but alas I didn’t.   I think I need a faster camera (and that lens from above) in order to get a better shot at getting a bat-on-ball picture.

During the game, some guy proposed to his girl friend.  I think she said yes.  I love the expressions on her face.  All smiles!

Mike with some kids on top of a dugout.  He seemed to enjoy his work most when he was dealing with the little kids.

Below our seats the Maker’s Mark girls were getting their picture taken.  I have no clue what this girl was thinking, but her expressions are priceless.

Some more pictures of Mike working.  The crowd wasn’t loud enough.

But the best part of the game was at the end when Mike came up and sat with us for a bit.

 

Georgetown Baptist Church At Night

Way back on August 14th, I took a morning picture of the Georgetown Baptist Church.  In that post I thought about what it would look like at night and I found out last night. I was not disappointed.  The church is lit up nicely and I am very happy with the photo.  But between the two, I think I like the morning photo better.

First Try At Off Camera Flash Outside

First, I missed yesterdays blog entry because work got in the way!  How dare it! 

This evening Melissa and I went up to the park and I took some pictures of her with an off camera flash.  Even though I have very little clue as to what I am doing, I am pretty happy with how these turned out.   It is pretty clear to me that the flash was a little hot for these pictures, but I still like how they turned out.  I can see that this is going to take some practice to get it right.  I think I like the 2nd one the best.  I think once I get it all figured out, that I am going to be able to take killer shots at dusk.

Melissa Is In The Paper .... Again!

Back on the 13th of October, I blogged Jazzercise Back To School Donation which was about Melissa’s Jazzercise class collecting and donating school supplies to the local schools.   Melissa submitted the picture to the newspaper as a way of recognizing the tremendous generosity of her students.  Whenever they get behind a cause, they always go above and beyond what is called for to give back to the community.  I am always happy to help by taking their picture.  The fringe benefits I get is to see “Photo by Jim Cook” in the newspaper. 

People may not realize but our school teachers purchase school supplies with their own money for the kids that can’t afford them.  Some teachers have told Melissa that they easily spend $400 to $500 a year. Yikes!  There are lots of kids in the community whose parents can’t afford to purchase their school supplies.

Here is a photo using my night flash technique of the photo in the local paper, The Georgetown News-Graphic.

 

More Info On Digitizing Photos

I had an epiphany last night and I really do know how I came up with it.  It just popped into my head somehow.  I figured out a new way to transfer old photo’s that works at night when there isn’t any good daylight like I talked about in my post Digitizing Old Photos Using A Digital Camera. I found an old picture to give it a try and see if my idea was worth a pile of beans or not.  It is really simple actually. I just used my a flash on the camera.  Not the one that comes with the camera, but an external flash, in my case a Canon Speedlight 580EX. 

With this flash, you can direct the flash anywhere you want, so I just pointed it straight up from the camera to bounce the flash.   As I took the picture of the old photograph that was lying on the table, the camera was pointed down and the flash was pointed at a nearby wall.  I took the photo and the light bounced off of the wall so there is an even light on the photo and no harsh lighting issues on the photo.  Since the color on the wall was beige and wasn’t white, there was a slight color shift in the photo which I quickly corrected for in Photoshop.  Here is the finished result. 

This is like a 10 year old picture of Mike (left) and Rob (Right) on a water ride.  If I am not mistaken, it was a Geauga Lake (which I think was bought out by Sea World) in Aurora Ohio.  I think they enjoyed getting wet much more than I did.  Luckily I had this small waterproof camera which worked quite nicely to get this photo. Rob got the worst of it and was pretty much drenched.

Melissa Art

This is a picture that I tinkered with of Melissa driving my car.  I took this shot shortly after the Horse Park shot from a few days ago on our way home from Moe’s.  I didn’t care for the picture at first and figured that I wouldn’t use it for anything.  But I started to play with it to see if I could create something more interesting and came up with this image.  I love it.  I am finding that with a little work, average images can turn into something interesting.

But good golly I need to wash my dirty window!  The effect really brought out the dirt on my window.

Melissa In The Park

Melissa and I went to the Scott County park Sunday after we ate at Moe’s.  I wanted to try out some new shots with some interesting angles.   We didn’t really plan on taking pictures, but it was a gorgeous evening and I had my 10D in the car, so I figured what the heck.  Melissa was kind enough to pose for me as I took the pictures.   I really like the way they turned out and the cross processing effects I applied to them.  The modern look of these photos has me really excited about my photography as it seems to have taken a step to a whole new level. I am looking forward to Rob or Mike’s next girlfriend so I can apply this affect to couples photographs.  They are gonna rock! 

 

Moe's Southwestern Grill

Tonight Melissa and I had a craving for Moe’s.  So we jumped into the car and drove into Lexington to eat at Moe’s.   Moe’s is in Hamburg Place and it has the best Mexican food.  Ok, they call themselves a southwest grill, but any place that serves burritos is Mexican in my book. 

Melissa had a buy one, get one free coupon so we both ordered an Art Vandalay.  You see, Moe’s has funky names for their food.  But don’t let the names fool you, the food is awesome.  It just tastes so fresh that one would swear that they grew all the ingredients out back.  An Art Vandalay is a vegetarian burrito.

The cilantro salsa, which they call salsa verde, is our favorite.

And Melissa loves the guacamole, so we always get a side of guacamole.  Ok this picture, and the next one especially is a little out of focus. I was taking the pictures with my SD400 without flash and I wasn’t too steady with the camera.  The smell of Moe’s was getting to me and I really wanted to eat, so I rushed the pictures.

Here is a picture of my burrito after I took a bite out of it.  Now I have a pretty big mouth and you can see the size of my bite, so that tells you how huge the burritos are. I really wish this was in focus as the picture just doesn’t do the burrito justice.

On the way home driving up I75 we go right past the Kentucky Horse Park.   I took a picture out the window as we were going by.

Sloppy Borders In Photoshop Made Easy

In my last post, Photoshop Scripts, I talked a little bit about a Photoshop script I created to automatically add sloppy borders around my images like this:

This journal entry will be the details of what I did so you too can use my script and produce your own sloppy borders instantly.

Before I go into the process, you may be wondering why I didn’t create a Photoshop action to produce the sloppy border.  While actions are nice, they are limited in power and I couldn’t figure out a way to do it using just Photoshop actions.  That forced me to learn the much more powerful Photoshop Scripting.

The pre-requisite knowledge for you to be able to do this as well is just a limited computer knowledge (how to create directories and edit files) and knowledge of Photoshop.  You really don’t need to know the scripting syntax, but looking at the script should make some sort of sense.  The basic process that the script does is this:

• Enlarge the canvas of the active image by 10 pixels so that there is some room for the sloppy border
• Open the sloppy border template and resize it to the exact same size of the image
• Select all of the border template, copy it
• Close the sloppy border template
• Paste the copied sloppy border template on top of the original image
• flatten the layers

You could do all of those steps by hand and not use a script.  But if you do this often, it becomes pretty tedious and the sloppy border script comes in handy.

Here are the steps to produce your own script and sloppy border. 

(1) Make a directory (also known as a folder) in which to store your sloppy border script and psd file.  The directory name should be sloppy.  The location of the directory needs to be in the /presets/scripts directory where you installed adobe Photoshop.  On my windows system, the full path is:

C:\Program Files\Adobe\Adobe Photoshop CS2\Presets\Scripts\sloppy

(2) you need to design your sloppy border template.  Create a .psd file called Sloppy-1.psd which has the border that you want to outline your photos.  Here is an example of what the file should look like in Photoshop.

Basically you have a border around the outside and in the middle you have a deleted region so that there isn’t anything. Save this in the sloppy directory.  My image is about 500 pixels by 300 pixels in size and it seems to work well.  However, I think any sized image (within reason) should work fine. If you want to be lazy, just copy the above image into Photoshop, place a selection around the checker box area and then delete it.

(3) With a text editor, create a sloppy1.js file in the sloppy directory which has the following contents:

var curDoc = app.activeDocument; curDoc.resizeCanvas(curDoc.width+UnitValue("10 px"),curDoc.height+UnitValue("10 px")); var sloppyDoc=open(File(app.path+"/presets/scripts/sloppy/sloppy-1.psd")); sloppyDoc.resizeImage(curDoc.width,curDoc.height); sloppyDoc.selection.selectAll(); sloppyDoc.selection.copy(); sloppyDoc.close(SaveOptions.DONOTSAVECHANGES); curDoc.paste();curDoc.mergeVisibleLayers();

You can just copy the above 10 lines and paste into the .js file to quickly create your script instead of typing the whole thing.  You may need to adjust and change the 10 px values in the script on line 2  if your border is either larger or smaller than mine to make it work correctly.  You will know when you run your script and see the results.

Your contents of the sloppy directory should be:

(4) Finally, it is time to test your script. Restart Photoshop if it is already active.  Then open an image that you want to put a sloppy border around.  Then select file -> scripts -> sloppy1 to execute the sloppy1 script.    Your photo should have a sloppy border around it.  If the border crops out too much of the picture, adjust the 10 px to something larger in line 2 of the sloppy1.js file.   If there is some gap between the border and your image, decrease the 10px values.  Use trial and error till you get something nice.

Some caveats.  I am new to Photoshop scripting and I haven’t performed extensive testing, so it may not work in all cases.  But feel free to play around with the script and modify it to your liking.   You can easily scale this to other border types by just making a Sloppy-2.psd sloppy2.js (and editing line 3 to point to Sloppy-2.psd) and storing it in the sloppy directory.  And finally, this sloppy border script follows a programming design philosophy of  “do the simplest thing that could possibly work”.  It doesn’t do any advanced calculations that would be required to perfectly fit the border on top of the image. While not perfect, it works well in practice. 

Have fun scripting and if you make any significant changes or improvements to this script that you want to share, please post a comment here so that others can benefit. 

 

Photoshop Scripts

I do most of my photo editing in Photoshop.  The sloppy borders that I placed around the artsy photos in Michael Goes To College took many steps to do.  It took me about a minute to apply the effect for each picture.  10 photos took 10 minutes.  Tonight I created a script that does it all in a few seconds.  If you have a good foundation in programming in JavaScript, then you are 90% of the way to being able to program scripts in Photoshop.  The other 10% is just learning the Photoshop specific objects, properties and methods.   You do so by reading the Adobe Photoshop JavaScript Scripting Reference which is located here -> http://partners.adobe.com/public/developer/en/photoshop/sdk/JavaScriptReferenceGuide.pdf

I am still learning the ins-and-outs of this, but I am finding scripting to be a very powerful tool to automate my workflow.  Here is a picture I took a few years ago that I randomly chose from my photos and I applied the sloppy border in an instant.  Scripting rocks!

 

Michael Goes To College

Today, Michael moved into his dorm at Eastern Kentucky University.  Here is a picture of him in the morning around 7am just before we left the house for the 45 minute drive down to Richmond, Kentucky.

Before I continue with the story, I just wanted to let you know that all of the pictures are majorly photoshopped to give them the “hip” look that a college guy deserves.  Actually, I am starting to love this cross processed look and  I suspect you will see it quite a bit in my future picture postings.

Boy, things have certainly changed since Melissa  and I went to college.  We remember the old days of pure chaos.  People arriving simultaneously, standing in line for hours to get checked into the dorm and then the bazillion trips in 100 degree heat getting your stuff from the car, which was 10 miles away, into your room.  

Well, let me tell you that EKU’s process should be the model for the world’s universities.   Students were assigned a particular time to arrive to even out the flow of students.  The parking in front of the build was designated a drop off zone so you could unload your car. And get this, they have tons of students there with orange vests on whose job it was to help unload the car and carry Michael’s junk to his room.   What a fantastic idea. 

Here is a picture of the unloading process and a couple of girls in the orange vest.

Michael is unpacking in his room

Melissa and Michael coming out of his dorm.

Next thing that EKU did that was fantastic was let Michael pre-order his books over the Internet.  Then all he had to do was go and pick up his books that were already boxed and waiting for him.  This process of picking up the books was literally less than 5 minutes including the 2 minutes we were in line.

Melissa with a glow effect on the image coming out of the Student Services building where Michael got his parking permit. I was sly and took the picture with the camera down by my hip.

Unfortunately I didn’t get a picture of the cafeteria where we ate lunch.  I was just so excited to get to eat at 11am (I skipped breakfast) that I forgot to take any pictures.  The all you could eat buffet was amazing and Michael will enjoy eating there.  The campus was beautiful and his dorm is centrally located for easy access.

Here is a picture Michael and Melissa hanging out in the commons area of the dorm.  We are waiting for a rain shower to pass before we head out to get him some last minute necessities at wal-mart.

Here is a picture of Josh Chenault.  Josh and Michael are friends from Georgetown.  Josh stopped by his dorm to say hello and check out Michael's room.  Josh was all smiles and we asked him why he was so happy.  He responded that he just found out that the ratio of girls to guys on campus is 4 to 1.  Look out ladies!

And here is my final picture — Michael Cook — BMOC.

I called him to see how he is doing and just got off the phone. He said he has met several girls and already has a phone number.  I told him that he need go get 3 more to keep up with the 4 to 1 ratio.  He told me that Josh had heard wrong.  Michaels RA told him that the ratio is actually 6–1    I guess Mike has his work cut out for him!

Cross Processing

I have been playing with cross processing in photoshop tonight. I have been scanning the web looking for different techniques.  Cross processing is an old film term.  What they would do is take pictures with one type of film, and process it with chemicals like it was another type of film.  This would produce artsy types of photos.   Here is an example of a picture I took of Michael and the resulting cross processed picture.

 

The 2nd photo sort of looks like the photos that appear on Saturday Night Live.  There are numerous looks one can achieve with cross processing.  I plan to continue to play around with them.