Reading
and following a help file is a good way to learn how to use an
application, but in my opinion following an interactive tutorial is a
great way to add to that knowledge - TrevorF
Here's one of many of Angela Cable’s tutorials. This is on artistic cropping.
Train yourself to see these things. A tutorial on artistic cropping that might help some:
http://www.fortunecity.com/westwood/alaia/354/tutorials/cropping/
Depth of Focus/Field PSP 9 tutorial for creating DOF
Paint Shop Pro
Kris Zaklika answers a question, and describes how to modify colours with Paint Shop Pro.
md wrote:
I asked you guys for help before with this and someone kindly suggested the retouch tool for the job. It worked, but didn't give me the colour I wanted! I’m trying to modify this image http://www.theminorsite.co.uk/images/mini/Dscf0024large.jpg to paint the main body colour to a vivid yellow, something like #F6F82E. Using the retouch tool set to 'color to target' kept all the detail of the body and sunspots etc from the base image, but gave this result http://www.theminorsite.co.uk/images/mini/green.jpg - not exactly the hue I had in mind! I can use the layers saturation and luminance properties to gain a variety of colours, but no matter what base colour I select, I still can’t get an actual yellow out of it! Can someone please offer any assistance here?
Certainly. However, before telling you how to get yellow, I'd like you to think how you would make this red car a deep maroon color. What kind of color is maroon? Well, it is a saturated red that is also very dark. So, if you wanted to change this car to a maroon you would need to darken it, right? Next, let's stop and think about what Color to Target does. It retains the original lightness of the color and changes the hue and saturation of the color. As a result the Color to Target tool would be useless for changing red to maroon because it doesn't change the lightness.
Though you haven't said what version of the product you are using, the fact that you mention Color to Target suggests you are using PSP 7 and not one of the more recent versions. The rest of my advice will therefore be for PSP 7.
Now let's get to the meat of the problem - how to go from red to yellow. Vivid yellow is a highly saturated color like your red but obviously has a different hue from red (which is why the color has a different name from red). What may not be so obvious is that it is a significantly lighter color than red. When we lower the lightness of yellow we get a khaki color, which is what happened to you. The relationship of yellow to khaki is just like the relationship of red to maroon that I discussed above.
The answer to your "how do I make it yellow?" problem is to lighten the khaki color you received after using the Color to Target brush. There is a variety of ways to set about this. However, the one that probably works best in PSP 7 is the following. First, invoke the Magic Wand too, set the Match Mode to Hue, the Tolerance to about 20 and select the khaki color you just created. Shift-click on any bits that did not get selected the first time. Once you have the selection right, do Colors > Adjust > Gamma Correction. Set the Gamma for all three color channels to some value between around 2 and 4 according to your taste.
Every time you want to change a color to a light one such as yellow, white or pastel you will have to go through a lightening procedure. When the lightness change is very drastic - such as turning black into yellow - you may have to do it differently than I described above, resorting to the Histogram Adjustment filter and changing not only Gamma but also the Output Min Value. Whenever you want to create a dark color like black or ultramarine, you will have to go through a darkening procedure. You can do this with Gamma values less than one. In extreme cases Output Max may need to be lowered in Histogram Adjustment.
If you are going to do a lot of this sort of recoloring, I'd like to point out that in PSP 9, the latest version of PSP, the Retouch brushes you are using appear as a new Change to Target brush with Color, Hue, Saturation and Lightness target modes. This brush works in a way much more in accord with human perception and in Color mode allows you to get very close to your target yellow in one step.
You may want to consider upgrading to PSP 9. (As the user of a prior version of PSP you are entitled to a reduced upgrade price if you are a registered user or can provide proof of purchase.)
From the Paint Shop Pro newsgroup, Kris Zaklika posts the list below:
http://thepluginsite.com/
http://www.cybia.co.uk/plugins.htm
http://www.filtermeister.com/filtergallery/index.htm
http://www.redfieldplugins.com/
http://www.freephotoshop.com/
http://photoshop.msk.ru/
http://www.geocities.com/murakuma/mmplugins.html
http://www.v-d-l.com/
http://www.fantasticmachines.com
http://www.frischluft.com
http://www.flamingpear.com/
http://www.alienskin.com
http://www.andromeda.com
http://www.autofx.com
http://www.avbros.com
http://tinyurl.com/4p7fx
http://www.panopticum.com
In PSP filters are built into the program, those things with the dialog boxes and before and after previews. Plug-ins are external programs that talk to the image editor using an agreed upon interface. The plug-in may do one thing or many things depending how it is coded. It may modify the image or it may simply make a selection in an image. It may do nothing at all to the image, simply providing the means to save the image in some specific format. There are also plug-in organizers that allow you to run one of many separate plug-ins from the organizer.
Can anyone recommend any freeware photo-album
software where you do not have to
navigate backwards out of a slideshow to escape the album back to
where you came from?
http://jalbum.net/
This photo gallery software makes web albums of your digital images.
JAlbum
aims to be the easiest to use and most powerful tool in this category -
and
free!
JAlbum runs on Windows, Mac OS X, Linux and others and speaks 18
languages.
Today JAlbum is mentioned over 1.800.000 times on the Internet
(Google/Altavista) and this site has over 5000 visitors per day and a
live
community. I hope you find it your tool of choice for sharing images.
JAlbum is written after numerous disappointments with existing photo
gallery
software. With JAlbum you have full control of the look of the generated
album, not just color theme and basic layout, still making an album is
just
a matter of drag and drop + a button click if you prefer to use one of
the
many existing looks.
JAlbum will process your images, make index pages
and
slide show pages, and even upload the final album to the Internet for
your
friends to see.
No extra software is needed to view the albums - just your web browser.
Unlike "server side" album scripts, JAlbum albums
can be served
from a plain web server without scripting support. You can also share
your
albums on CD-ROM.
You'll probably need FTP client software to
upload an album to your web page area.
When I last looked there were two free ones - WS_FTP, and CuteFTP. But
a more recent one is Filezilla
http://sourceforge.net/projects/filezilla/
