Old San Francisco

∇ Category:Entertainment | → 0 Comments |

San Francisco – Market Street – circa 1905

From Ed Rabbit

Photoshop to the rescue

∇ Category:Technology and Toys | → 0 Comments |

I really enjoy taking photos. Generally I do more candid work which does not allow me to stage the background. I took this photo of my friend Joyce in her lovely dress. Unfortunately, there are a lot of distracting elements in the background that draws my eye from what should be a stunning picture of beautiful woman in a fabulous dress.

Click on the photo to make it larger.

Notice the brown box in the back, the white board has scribbled upon with blue ink, a garbage can just to the right of her and the depth of field is such that the background is in focus.

Click on the photo to make it larger.

I started by adjusting the contrast and color to make adjust for the flash. This is easily done in Picasa or other free tools and it makes a significant difference.
I then cropped the photo so that the some of the distracting qualities were diminished while placing her face in the upper right third of the picture and keeping the angle of her body going along that same axis to the lower third of the shot. Notice the red line that I drew to cut the photo into thirds.

Then next thing I worked on was removing her from the background. This was done by using photoshop and a the magic wand tool to select the subject, used feathering and copied her from the background layer to a new layer.

From here I identified the offensive background objects and did a quick job of removed them. I just cut and paste the wall and molding over them. Then I changed the brightness and size to make it fit. That works pretty well and should be relatively quick. Also it does not need to be perfect because I knew I was going to blur the background. Then I blurred the background layer and saved it as a jpeg.

And poof!

Canon MP480

∇ Category:Technology and Toys | → 0 Comments |

Canon MP480 All-in-One Photo Printer

I purchased this printer a about 8 months ago and it is one of the best all-in-one printers I have ever owned. It works great on multiple platforms (mac, windows, etc…). The printer is easy to use, truly a plug and play device and the quality of print is solid on both text and photos. The scanner has saved my butt many times when working from home. The real ease of use test is that I have purchased the same model for my parents (not very tech savvy folks) and have not had to do any troubleshooting since plugging it in. I would highly recommend it.

The best part, is that is sells for around $70 (as of this post) and comes with ink and usb cable so you can start printing right away.

The Ink:
Canon PG-210 Black Cartridge ($16)

Canon CL-211 Color Cartridge ($21)