Wednesday, June 10, 2009

Picture a Day - Day 189

Would you all believe me if I told you that the photoshop program I use to clean up all my pictures and even to do those wedding ring pictures a few months back is a little on the ancient side in computer land?

Oh no, no much much older than 5 - 5. It's so old it's past the days of reading workbooks, swings and long division and just graduated on to middle school (I hope the poor thing can learn how to use a locker).

I've been able to run a program over 12 years old (while having a computer that's only 4) because I got one of the last eMacs which can run both OS X and OS 9 at the same time. Very nice, but completely useless now that the intel chip is king.

So I've been thinking more and more I should navigate away from any computer program old enough to think that sassing back is a good idea. Thus began my hunt for a photoshop that wouldn't cost an arm, a leg and possibly part of a torso. I also had to find something just old enough to run on my dinosaur but new enough it was worth the upgrade.

I was about to give up hope when this box magically showed up in the mail (all it required was an order form and some magical numbers off a plastic card stored deeply in my wallet).
I started playing with it a bit last night (my playing was cut rather short due to evil storms abrewing in the horizon).Is this where I insert random gibbering and drool? Because, oh man, this thing rocks!

I'm sure all you out there who do have professional and up to date versions are probably turning your nose down at me right about now but I don't care. I love my little white box with the creepy flower umbrella to bits (I even dared to page through the manual a bit which I never do).

A lot of the options and fancy stuff are still the same it's just there's so much more control put in the users hands. I can finally control and alter areas that I could never touch before without a ton of layers and a lot of swearing on my part.

Sadly I don't have a lot of really cool pictures that could use some fancy photoshop edits that you haven't seen before, so I pulled up my old picture of rain drops on leaves and messed around a bit. This is the original picture.
And this is my new radioactive leaves with a little bit of canvas texture added for good measure. I like what the radiation did to the back leaves and the water splots, gives it an almost slimey feel.Don't worry if you like the first picture more. I was just messing around on the second to see what all I could do (but not so far so that no one could recognize what it was). RADIOACTIVE LEAVES ARE GOING TO ATTACK YOUR TOWN!

I have a whole lot of photoshopping to do to catch up on this bad boy and I can't wait. What pictures should I do first? Anyone got something they need cleaned up?

Maybe I can talk Boris into another photshoot and this time I can make his legs three times longer and shrink his mandibles down to nothing.

3 comments:

valerie said...

Hey, Elements does some fun stuff. Nothing wrong with it. Most people that have the full program don't know how to use it anyway and just buy actions (which I don't think you can use on Elements though) from other people to do all their work for them. :p

For the longest time I had Photoshop CS2 and it had a creepy peacock feather that taunted me while it bounced in my dock, refusing to work.

I like the radioactive leaves. If I eat them, will I get superpowers?!

Linda said...

I got Elements 7, but I have no clue how to use it. I've played with it a bit but I'm useless.
Love the leaves!

Anonymous said...

That's a really good idea - get an older version of photoshop for less! I've always wanted photoshop, but I'm a bit wary of the cost.