Daniel Hess

Old school digital photography.  Note: I forgot to add in above post that I also added bevel and shadow to the "cloud" border around the "opening".  The dogs left to right were "Ginger, Rambo, Caesar, Miss Blue, and Titan".

Over the years, we have had several Doberman's, almost all, rescues. I have been working on a "Heaven's Gate" layout for all of them.  I have left a "spot" to, in the future, add our current dog, who is starting to slow down.  I have very few photos of a couple of them, and alot of the photos I have were taken before the current level of digital sophistication (anybody remember owning and using a Sony Mavica, complete with the "3.5 inch floppy disk" film?).  I took a large "cloud" image and using the pen tool in freehand draw, created a "hole" which I cut out and made transparent.  Before losing the vector, I ran the vector tube script on it using the built in cloud picture tube file.  I ran it three times then single clicked a couple of clouds into the remaining gaps.  Found a suitable heaven's gate image and put it behind the clouds. After that I added the dogs and used drop shadow with zero offset and high blur settings (twice on each dog) to make them "glow" just a bit.   Font is Vineta BT at 150 pixels with some bevel and shadow.  I did the font on an elliptical path after making a duplicate of the vector. I moved the duplicate elliptical path down, then ran the vector tube with the cloud tube again, added bevel and shadow and deleted the vector.  (Note: going to add a photo of me and my Mavica from WAY BACK....in the next post LOL).

We pretty much showcase almost ALL wildlife as the seasons change but there are a few that have encroached from elsewhere.  I'm good with the DILLOS....lets just keep the Killer African Bees and other dangerous critters that have been moving northward...AWAY from our borders.

@Ann Seeber We gave your "dish" a go for breakfast this a.m.  Used Bolillo Buns and I must say, it was delicious.  Thanks for the "idea".

I am reactivating a VERY OLD THREAD here. The GRFX studio plugin has quit working with all versions including the 2020 with which it came.  Anybody else run into this issue in recent times. I keep getting Network Error: Application cannot continue.  I THINK maybe they have discontinued it and shut down the URL that the plugin connected to when it was invoked.  I HOPE NOT because if so, it is probably a permanent shut down.  Curious.

I'm think I'm hearing/catching a lot of rumbles about the glitches and bugs in PSP 2023 in this workshop forum.  I hope it isn't really that bad.  I skipped it and decided to wait for 2024 version but they are WAY late in my way of thinking.  Seems like they usually have released the new year at the end of the previous year in most cases.  Anyways, anybody heard anything about when PSP 2024 is going to hit the street?  (Mostly what I THINK I've heard are problems with Text functions...someone couldn't go back and edit in one case, and problems with text wrapping I think?).

Day 7 submission.  

51 minutes ago, Anne Lamp said:

Day 5  I skipped making a project for some of the the days and did this one .  The alpha is cass-Licorice1-Alphabet ex.(with the color changed on some letters) The spinach is from Google then cropped. The spoon is from C F.   ps I still don't care for cooked spinach, but I no longer put sugar on it.

LOL.  I'm not sure even sugar would remedy the awful taste of spinach.  Another food that absolutely gives me a gag reflex is Liver.  I'm a protein loving guy but have NEVER been able to stomach the taste (or smell) of liver.  Maybe some sugar on that LOL?  Food like that went in pieces under the lip of the plate piece by piece when nobody was looking.  Then scrape it all into a napkin also when nobody else was looking and kept in my lap until could excuse myself and deliver plate to sink and napkin to the circular file.  Of course with 4 siblings, I got tattled on and busted a couple of times.

54 minutes ago, Ann Seeber said:

STORY TIME-LESSON 5 - FOOD - I recreated this from 2 years ago but made many changes. 

Kind of like a grilled cheese sandwich but with cream cheese and the bread is soaked with eggs.  I might have to try that sometime.  Easy to make.

Day 6.  Got with it and finished this one a little earlier.  

Day 5.

A Day late but took some extra time with the day 4 entry; trying to practice some of the "lessons" LOL.  No real stories spelled out.  I also played A LOT of baseball in my youth but although there are a lot of photos in my parent's photo albums, I somehow never actually scanned any of those.  I'll be going back to IOWA for a wedding next month and if I get to spend some time in the old house, I might peek into all those albums and see about taking some more memories out of them.  That's my granddaughter (who is now going on 17 years old) with the fishing pole, the first time she went out in the boat with me.

@Cassel Yes, I got your response.  In the original email, something must have glitched in the email when it came in.  I kept getting page not available responses but apparently that was only here.  On a side note again, my post yesterday about the yearbooks and old photos..."back in the day" when I was working on those, I was using the Jasc PSP 3 and later 4 versions and didn't know ANYTHING yet about what could truly be done with them.  I haven't had EVERY in between version but can pretty much say have owned most of them up to XI then about 2018 and on.

@Cassel I try to be very careful when resizing.  A LOT of my photos are very old and were scanned many years ago when storage was very expensive and in short supply.  I cut a lot of corners by resizing down, "proportionally" in 99 percent of the cases, and moving the compression slider down towards the lower quality side.  So like you said in your article, sometimes I even have made myself cringe a little bit.  Huge case in point...I did the yearbooks for my high school in Spain for every year it was in existence and posted them online.  Folks from all era's sent me either the yearbook (or a zerox copy in the case of most of the pre 1970 books) and I pretty much wore out a flatbed scanner working on that project.  This was back when we were using dial up modems so storage wasn't the only issue...page loading time was also important.  Each page was originally HUGE after being scanned then I killed quality trying to optimize for loading times and storage.  You can see those pages at www.toroscope.com which is my yearbook site.  I remember the standard I set was 600 width  and 765 height (pixels) and the real crime was moving the quality slide down to keep the images in the 25 to 70 KByte range.  My personal photos when I scanned from my parent's photo albums back in those early days were much the same.  As you said, sizing down is easy with a lot of forgiveness possible but it's very hard sometimes to size up.

Day 3. 

Not really an event but our visits and get togethers over the years were recurring and memorable events.  When we lived in Spain, my parents flew my grandparents over and they got to experience a little bit of Europe and visit with the family.

I threw something together for this one.  Not especially good but it's got some things from high school years.

@Ann Seeber Maybe search the "documents" folder for USA-MAP.PspShape and see where it landed.  Apparently NOT in the documents/Corel Paintshop Pro/2023/Preset Shapes folder.  ???  I don't have 2023...I didn't see anything that tripped my trigger better than 2022 but am ANXIOUSLY awaiting to see what 2024 is going to bring.  I figure the best of 2023 will also be included in that.  Punctuation is KEY in the file names and folder names...you miss one capital letter and it will give you nothing.

@Ann Seeber @Mary Solaas @Corrie Kinkel OK.  Need to lose the period that ended up in the link at the end.  Let me try again.

http://www.toroscope.com/files/USA-MAP.zip 

Better to copy and paste the link in the address bar.  When I tried on my reply, it gave me something about unsecure download.  Should work fine just typing it in or pasting it.  OR BEST...right click then "Save link as" from this post.

@Mary Solaas @Corrie Kinkel

You can get the pspshape file here: http://www.toroscope.com/files/USA-MAP.zip. I warn you...it wasn't done as elegantly as it could have been...if you load it up and look at the vectors there are ALOT of objects throughout the thing and I wasn't completely methodical i.e. start in upper left and work all the way across then down some and again etc.  I kind of jumped around until I had all the borders.  PS...remember Carole's lesson on file types regarding this...just unzip and put the pspshape file into documents/CorelPSP/Preset Shapes folder.

I'm now wondering what painting with paintbrush with "Lock" tool is all about.  Didn't see anything like that in the PSP help topics.

Added the states to my USA pre-set shape.  I'm happy with it.

Totally enjoyed this workshop.  Gonna do a diamond membership for a few months and try to pick up some of the classes and information available for PSP.  My next project already started is to do a preset shape of a USA map.  I guess to do state borders internal to the closed vector path, you just select the lines (vs edit) with pen tool and put them in seperate.  I'll find out if that is just a folly in my mind LOL.  

Carole, on the "invisible" question, I don't believe so...it disappeared when I CUT it from the base image and showed up for final repositioning after pasting.  It just (many times) did NOT paste the cutout (transparent) into the original vector.  The "undo" to the Reverse Path command with a new Reverse Path inserted in the process worked.  I'm sure I have been doing something wrong but the only thing I can think is using the "Select None" after creating a selection to change multiple nodes to Symmetrical...I couldn't seem to get it back into edit mode any other way.

Anyhow, I finished the 16 cups rendition AND some of them with additional cutouts. Also Lessons 6 and 7.  I did NOT do the text part of that...I just went for a real complex "cut with knife" thing on a circle using a compass layer to divide it equally into 4 parts.  Here are the results.