Friday, May 21, 2010

Another Distraction

In an effort to make my blogging experience unique to me, I have ventured into the world of image editing.  I used to use a simple Microsoft editor but it has become unsupported by new operating systems.  Of course being eternally cheap and unwilling to purchase Adobe or another editing program, I have opted to try out Gimp.

Gimp is very similar to Adobe photoshop, which I gave up learning years ago, around the time I started having children and my brain just couldn't handle that much information.  There have been so many changes and advancements, I wasn't sure how I would be able to learn even the basics of photo editing.

I barely understand the vocabulary, but some of this is sinking in.  So far, I have figured out how to create a new image, add layers, scale and move.  Today I began learning about cloning and healing.  Oh, holey, moley!  This is getting complicated.  Cloning is copying just a spot on the photo to cover up something else on the photo.  Healing is a version of that process.

Believe it or not, this actually has everything to do with my efforts in gardening.  I want to see how I can improve the landscaping of our yard with actual pictures instead of visions in my mind.  I figured if I had a picture of my yard, I could add pictures of flowers and plants I like, to see how I could arrange them to suit the house.  It was raining too much today to get a current photo so I had to use an old one.

This is what the yard looked like when we first moved here.

Since I am adding flowers and other images to this photo, I opted to leave the final product rather imperfect.  There are ways to perfect the cloning process but my brain is really tired now.

It occurred to me, my latest blog layout is also my efforts in photo editing.  The rose background is an edit of a photo of my mother's day roses.

4 comments:

Alyssa said...

What a cool idea! Do you have the edited picture? (Even if it's not perfect?!) Would love to see how it looks :)

Jen said...

Gimp is very good {from what I hear}, I have never used it myself, but you are correct that Photoshop is not very user friendly!!!

SO very excited to see you blogging more :)

RedBettySummer said...

Thanks for the encouragement, Jen. Alyssa, I only posted the beginning of my edit- where I took out the bushes in front of my house. The next part I will add some new shrubs and flowers but I haven't found any good pictures of flowers to put in my photo. I will definately post my finished product.

Sherry said...

This was very interesting to me. What a great idea to learn more about working with photo's. When I get some time I would like to check out Gimp and see if I can learn something new. I put a note about it in my notebook so I won't forget. Thanks for sharing.