Fun With PhotoStudio

Today was the first day of my unemployment that I really felt I had the day off. I actually did a little online jobhunting stuff, but I also cleaned up the kitchen (well, most of it), watched Doctor Who, messed around online, solved my Firefox problem and, best of all, got 10 hours of sleep.

And I had some photo editing fun.

As I've mentioned from time to time, I don't have PhotoShop on my computer. I have ArcSoft PhotoStudio, which came free with my Canon Scanner, and again with my VAIO computer. But even that is capable of doing lots of fun stuff.

These photos are all from Sunday evening:

This one is a fairly innocuous edit. All I did was boost the saturation and lighten the highlights to make the popcorn clouds stand out from the blue sky better.


This sunset/dusk shot, taken a little later, I have not lightened, darkened or saturated, or even sharpened. But I did use the "emboss" tool on a low setting. Can you tell?


I did saturate this one quite a bit, but I'm still not satisfied. That pole is in the way.

Twenty minutes with a cloning tool later...ah, that's better. Just don't look too closely at the parking spaces.


Here's another one I saturated. But let's do one more thing:

This was done with the pastel effect tool. I also tried out Watercolor and Oil Painting, but this was more interesting. It reminds me of sailboats in a harbor.


This last shot is a composite of two screen captures, only one of which was mine. The girl is a character in this past week's Doctor Who story, "Silence in the Library." She has a mysterious connection to a library the size of a planet, and about one minute into the episode she freaks out a bit because "Someone's in the Library." People on the Doctor Who Forum have been having fun putting various images on her tv; I thought I'd show her the people in a completely different library - the one at Sunnydale High!

Going to bed now. Try to amuse yourselves without me for a bit. I know you can!

Karen