Amersham Beyond Group - 2nd Jan 2020

Meeting Notes on Creative Photography and Photo-Art
Post Reply
spb
Posts: 146
Joined: Tue Mar 25, 2008 7:04 pm

Amersham Beyond Group - 2nd Jan 2020

Post by spb » Fri Jan 03, 2020 9:02 pm

MONTHLY CHALLENGES

#9 PHOTO PAINTING

This challenge was either too easy or too much fun with over 90 images submitted! A range of photo painting tools and techniques were employed, some producing traditional effects like oils and watercolour and some definitely from the digital age.

It was interesting and a little depressing in 2020 to see that several photo painting tools still exhibited technical problems – often in relation to Mac vs Windows software implementation issues. The notes from last month HERE have been updated with the latest experiences to avoid duplication.

As expected, in-built Photoshop filters were much less realistic than dedicated photo painting apps and members who ventured to install dedicated software were rewarded with impressive and powerful capabilities many of which would certainly fool members of the general public into thinking that we had suddenly acquired painting and drawing skills.

Most members rendering the entire image with an effect (rather than just a part such as a sky) but some blended their painted images with the originals for a more subtle and ‘enhanced photographic’ effect.

Several members realised for themselves that an imperfect image (unsharp, badly photoshopped, low resolution etc) can be painted to produce an impressive high resolution perfectly sharp end result. Furthermore, a small crop from a larger image can be upsized and painted very successfully. Controls in the software will often allow control over the amount of detail in the painted result, ranging from a detailed accurate depiction to a loose watery impression.

Photo painting has been an important part of my creative arsenal for several years and it was good to see other members’ realisation of it’s potential. I have become obsessed with the realistic watery results from Waterlogue (despite bugs in the PC implementation) and will be continuing to look for images that benefit from its unique look in the months ahead.

The next Challenge will be;

#10 SILHOUETTE

An image in which the main subject is dark (not necessarily black) and without detail against a light background.

I am hoping for newly taken or at least newly processed creative images rather than just digging out some underexposed mistakes that we all have on disk!

PHOTOSHOP THRESHOLD
All versions of Photoshop and Photoshop Elements have a filter and an Adjustment Layer called Threshold. This is a brilliantly simple way to create a silhouette from any image. A single slider chooses a tonal level somewhere in the range from 0 (black) to 255 (white). Everything below the chosen tone is black. Everything above the chosen tone is white. Simples.

BACK OF BEYOND - DIARIES

BACKUPS
I have spent most of my spare time in the last month rebuilding my desktop PC after a disastrous meltdown. This has now been completed and my various layers of backups have been essential but this experience has caused me to evaluate each component;

1. Simple Mirroring. A few key data folders are copied onto various (grandfather-father-son) removable cheap USB Portable HDD’s using SyncBackFree. This was the simplest, quickest and least opaque of all my backups. It quickly restored all of my key images and documents. The portable HDD’s must be unplugged and physically distributed for effectiveness.

2. Disk Image of C: using Macrium Reflect Free – I chose not to restore this because it was created a couple of weeks before the meltdown and the Windows Reset had incorporated two major upgrade steps to the lastest release 1909. As a result I spent days re-installing and re-configuring all of my programs. However it was useful to have Macrium Reflect Free mount the Disk Image as a drive letter so that I could dive-in and recover some colour profiles and saved settings files that were not saved elsewhere. In future I will create a disk image immediately after each major Windows update and re-loading that image should cut my recovery time by a week or more.

3. Windows File History saved to my NAS – I distrust anything that I don’t fully understand and the complexities of this Microsoft equivalent to the Mac ‘Time Machine’ render it rather opaque to me. In the past I have used it to recover the occasional file that has become overwritten, but that’s all. The procedures to create and operate Windows File History are arcane and in the past it has mysteriously ceased to create the hourly backups for days or weeks. It is certainly not ‘fire and forget’. To make matters worse when I re-started it after the re-build I failed to research the obscure means to link it to the file history created from before the meltdown so I suspect that it has duplicated my entire 1TB backup and eaten up all my spare storage. I may have to delete it all and start again to recover the wasted space.

4. Cloud Storage. When I re-installed Dropbox I discovered that the price had jumped from £0 to >£100 which was more than it was worth to distribute password vaults and a few photos. I then realised that I already had an operational 1TB OneDrive capability included with MS Office so that is now being used increasingly for distribution between devices and people. However cloud services are too slow (for me) to use for the big backup jobs.

5. 1Password. Holds all family passwords and important notes in encrypted vaults and distributes them to five devices. Having ceased Dropbox, I signed up to the 1Password account which includes its own cloud distribution. This treasury of important facts was always available on the other four devices whilst I re-built my desktop and was an absolutely invaluable source of registration keys and installation notes.

If this all sounds impossibly, ridiculously, complex – it is. However simple folder mirroring and 1Password were the key to avoiding sleepless nights.

Cheers, Steve

Post Reply