Experiment of the day: touchup time
Sep. 18th, 2011 11:28 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
stephbgI do not recall having done much in the way of raster image manipulation in my time, so it was with some trepidation I faced the prospect of tinkering with rock pictures beyond global changes in low-mid-high tone brightness and/or contrast. At a pinch I've increased the colour saturation, but only globally. All reasonable camera correction stuff.
Tonight I was all ready to crop around some microscope shots of a polished crazy lace agate egg, to avoid my usual complaint of light reflections. And can you blame me? This is the unprocessed (albeit compressed for web) image captured by the microscope:
A few spots of glare, to be sure; one for each LED around the lens. So I had a play with the Clone brush and a few other once-familiar tools in Paint Shop Pro 9, and came out with this:
I call it a reasonable first effort to remove the most glaring(!) errors. I'm not too fussed at the obvious signs of cloning here and there, as a bit of additional patterning is not entirely out of character. I tinkered a bit with adjusting selections of the image, rather than making global adjustments. Again, a rough old job and you can clearly see the edges of poorly selected areas, but there you have it.
I was pleased to discover that I'm a lot more nimble with the track pad than when I last attempted something like this, so the current hardware and mouse-hostile furniture setup will take me a little further yet. Other experiments have led me to combine my more confident vector-management skills in Visio with the image manip options in PSP9, and I'm slowly rediscovering the basics I'll need for the ideas currently rattling around in the old skull. But wow, the user documentation for PSP SUCKS BALLS. Good thing I'm accustomed to stubbornly figuring out undocumented software by myself.
I remind myself that it doesn't matter what the image looks like, because (a) I'm having fun, and (b) yunno, Art.
Am I reinventing the wheel? Going places where many have trod before? I surely am, but it's my first time and that makes the journey of interest to me if (quite justifiably) to no-one else. You are welcome to join me or not as the whim takes you. But I do offer as incentive the reasonably high probability of me swearing and ranting at software, which might be Fun.
Tonight I was all ready to crop around some microscope shots of a polished crazy lace agate egg, to avoid my usual complaint of light reflections. And can you blame me? This is the unprocessed (albeit compressed for web) image captured by the microscope:
A few spots of glare, to be sure; one for each LED around the lens. So I had a play with the Clone brush and a few other once-familiar tools in Paint Shop Pro 9, and came out with this:
I call it a reasonable first effort to remove the most glaring(!) errors. I'm not too fussed at the obvious signs of cloning here and there, as a bit of additional patterning is not entirely out of character. I tinkered a bit with adjusting selections of the image, rather than making global adjustments. Again, a rough old job and you can clearly see the edges of poorly selected areas, but there you have it.
I was pleased to discover that I'm a lot more nimble with the track pad than when I last attempted something like this, so the current hardware and mouse-hostile furniture setup will take me a little further yet. Other experiments have led me to combine my more confident vector-management skills in Visio with the image manip options in PSP9, and I'm slowly rediscovering the basics I'll need for the ideas currently rattling around in the old skull. But wow, the user documentation for PSP SUCKS BALLS. Good thing I'm accustomed to stubbornly figuring out undocumented software by myself.
I remind myself that it doesn't matter what the image looks like, because (a) I'm having fun, and (b) yunno, Art.
Am I reinventing the wheel? Going places where many have trod before? I surely am, but it's my first time and that makes the journey of interest to me if (quite justifiably) to no-one else. You are welcome to join me or not as the whim takes you. But I do offer as incentive the reasonably high probability of me swearing and ranting at software, which might be Fun.
