Wednesday, August 30, 2006

ATC a day for August, day 30

Practicing using the manual focus on the camera.....

Then selected the flower and stem, raised the contrast, lowered the contrast in the background, and finally, poster edged (the large version of the image).

1 comment:

I need orange said...

Thank you very much! :-)

Some of this stuff is just so cool to do -- finding all those colors when I shove the saturation slider -- wheeeeee! :-)

So far I have not done anything brilliant about organizing. I just put all the pics from one trip, say, in their own directory on the computer. I have pics/2006/chicago, for example.

This is sub-optimal. When I start messing with a flower pic, say, then I have to remember where that flower came from, or else have to move (or copy) it to some other directory..........

I do have directories of flowers, trees, textures, dogs, etc (also under "pics" as above, only not under a year). So when I take a pic of a flower in Millenium Park in Chicago, I could move that image to "flowers". Or copy it.......

I checked a classroom-in-a-book on Elements out of the library last spring, and worked through it. It had lessons on how to use the organizer that comes with elemnts 3 and up. It lets you put tags on your pics, so you store an image once and then elements will find any pics you've tagged as "flower", say, regardless of where they were stored in the file system.....

It makes me a leeetle nervous, the thought of using someone's proprietary organizer rather than my own common sense and the file structure, because then what, when elements becomes defunct in 20 years??????

I'm also wondering about backup. At this point I am backing up to our other computer, but when I get too many pics for that, I mean to buy an external hard drive, and back up to that. So I'm thinking that pics need to be on one directory (with all the branches and twigs I want under that) so I can back it up and still have it be recognizeable to me and to whatever organizer.............

So I am sort of in a cogitating-from-time-to-time phase on the organizing.

I need to scan all my old stuff. I was horrified, looking through our pics to make an ad to go in my daughter's high school yearbook, that the pics, closed up in supposedly archival books, are deteriorating significantly. Gotta get those scanned, so they won't deteriorate any more.

So I need to come to some sort of (I *HOPE*) sensible conclusion about how to organize, *before* I start increasing the number of images in question by orders of magnitude........

I suspect I'm going to have a major directory on c: which is "photos," and then organize 'em under that by chronology.

That way the worst that can happen is like having hardcopy photos in boxes, year by year........ You might have to look through a lot of pics, but ... too bad.

And then, maybe, take the plunge and let elements manage the bells and whistles.

I read that elements 4 *requires* you to use the organizer; no more browsing the file system. That sucks, imh. Big brother deciding what's good for me, or what??????

I haven't explored any of the organizing software. The elements organizer seemed to have a bunch of interesting features -- you can stack versions of the same pic, you have the tags, and so can find things by any tags you've assigned.....

I love photoshop, I'm too cheap to buy the full version (especially as I don't care about the cymk stuff, which seems to be about the only significant "advantage"), so I think I'm going to be using the elements organizer whether I would choose to or not..........