(attachment thread)

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Kraellin wrote: i may play around with these a bit

I was hoping you would say that. We make a good team.
Your welcome to post them at retouchpro. Let me know if you want them resized or otherwise modified.

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Kraellin wrote: he's getting accustomed to you

I don't know if it's possible to make him a genuine people cat now, after being born and partially raised wild but I guess I will find out.

thanks for letting me post them on retouch. i'll let you know if and when i do and post a link. and no, i dont need them resized. i can do that in psp if needed. i have a pretty good method for that (i dont use bicubic when resizing upwards). there is also a new method of resizing coming down the pike that pretty amazing, but i dont have a program for that one yet.

if you've got him comfortably sleeping near you now, he'll come around. just give him a small dish of milk every once in a while and he'll be purring in your lap. it may take a while, but cats always take a while even when originally domestic.

the first one was all done in psp and didnt take too long. it's remembering all the steps that's hard. psp doesnt save workflows, much to my dismay. so, it would be hard to recreate it exactly. i do know that i used the 'brushstrokes' filter for the main effect, but not much more than that. and no, it wouldnt have taken forever. psp can handle large sizes. but, now that i think about it, i did also do some hand work and that would take longer on a larger image size.

if you really want, you could post a larger image size on photobucket or someplace like that and post the link here and i would use that. but i dont guarantee that i'd try to replicate the last effect. in fact, most likely not. i tend to like NEW

cool beans

and here's the other...

hi ron,

good, glad you like them

2nd the best... ok. but crop on first one... hmmm... what if i did the same final treatment on the first that i did on the 2nd? it was basically just darkening the background a bit more.

the crop is somewhat based on the 'golden triangle' rule/guide. offsetting the main object tends to add a little more punch or interest. i forget why, but it seems to work most times

as for too much detail, it really doesnt matter too much. i did brighten the image first and then just blurred and darkened the background where i didnt like it. so, it's a matter of what belongs and doesnt belong and that varies with the image and less importantly, the technique. i did a ship scene recently on retouchpro where i removed several elements that were modern. the ship was an old sailing ship, so i wanted to give it an old world look. so, bye bye cars and anything modern

regarding what i like to work with... i used to work on icons/avatars going down to 50x50 pixels. but, i've also worked on 90 meg files. so, i'm easy generally, when doing photo art, retouching and restorations, the bigger the better. it's much easier to delete resolution/detail than to add it. so, yeah, big is good for photo art.

and yes, i used to take pictures all the time. i've had cameras ever since i was a teenager. by the time i was in my early 20's i had a Canon F1 film camera and was buying accessories as fast as i could earn money. then, somewhere in the mid 70's, i quit, mostly. i still had my camera but got busy with other things. when digital came along, i bought one of the first casio's, 640x480. lol. it wasnt very good, but it was such an innovation that i was hooked again, somewhat. but, it's only been recently that i got a real digital, 8 megapixel, 5x optical that i could carry around with me and started shooting a lot again. i'd carry it everywhere on my belt. but, it just got damaged here recently, so, i'm without again but, that shldnt last too long

when i got into computers in the early 70's, i was sort of hooked on that also. but, it wasnt till the mid 80's that i really did much with them and almost the 90's before i got into manipulating images with paint programs. by the end of the 90's i was still really only joking around with digital manipulating, but after the turn the century and particularly for the last few years, i've really taken to it and now help moderate on retouchpro. you can see some of my restorations and art over there. i use the same name as here.

so, you can see how my love of photography and now digital manipulation sort of came together here lately. filter forge just made it all that much easier to do even more. i've got all sorts of plugins for photoshop and psp but hardly ever use them any more because of FF

oh, and another thing that fueled my interest in photo manipulation was my old film negatives. i'd lost a lot of my old prints but still had a lot of my old negatives. so, i bought a negative scanner and run them into the computer, clean them up and print them out again. much fun my 'rose' pic is one of those. that was taken back in the mid 70's with my Canon F1 while running around Ann Arbor, Michigan.

and restorations came about through family photos of my mother's. she's even got old tintypes of great-grandparents which i scanned and then restored. quite cool

here's one of my old film negative images i ran through the negative scanner. this is before i cleaned it up again. these had been sitting around doing nothing for years. as you can see, there were specs and dust all over it

and then this is after 'artifying' it a bit. i actually have quite a few of these and put them in a slide show set to music. if i still had my server up, i could show you.

ok, so sliding back to the kitty pics, feel free to comment and ask for adjustments or something you'd like to see. i love doing custom work. trying to get 10,000 folks to go 'ooh' and 'ahh' is REALLY difficult, but getting ONE to do that... now, that's worth the effort

also, since i've spoken at length here, what about yourself? you've obviously got a good eye. i've commented on that a couple times here. are you pro? looking to go pro, or just having a really, nice hobby? oh, and do feel free to respond in the same lengthy manner as i did

I thought I would have a quick go at this one. I'm a slut for contrast and saturation.

I didn't discover photography until a couple of years ago and I only got into graphics a little more than a year ago so I am very much a novice. I wish I had started earlier. I feel like everything previous had been misguided.

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Kraellin wrote: you've set a border to it with darkening. nice

I ran it through my Lab Enhance filter then did a radial gradient with gray to white blended with linear burn.

This is Sphynx.'s thread. He's probably furious by now. I doubt that he will ever speak to us again.

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Kraellin wrote: kinda grabs ya, photography, doesnt it?

Photography was the gateway drug. It lead to post processing then to textures then to 3d. Now I'm totally consumed with Maya - every waking hour.

hehe, yeah, you've got the bug. poor, poor man!

well, i never got as far as my own darkroom in film, so i had to pay attention to getting the shot right the first time. so, i had filters and lenses and tripods and macro lenses and extension tubes and ... well, you get the idea.

now, my darkroom is psp or photoshop or FF. i love digital!

ok, there's a plugin for photoshop called 'Buzz' or 'Buzz Pro'. i was trying to recreate some of its features using only FF. i never finished the filter, but it does do some things. here's your 'pb3' photo under my buzz filter...

nothing really spectacular there. it's more of a softening filter. but, it's ok. lemme see if i cant find something else

Your buzz is nice but I think it would benefit pb3 from masking the eyes. I think the eyes (well, the one eye) of that photo are the most important part. It seems he's got the weight of the world on his shoulders.

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Kraellin wrote: when i got into computers in the early 70's

My first class used the PDP 11/70. I virtalized its instruction set on my Atari 600 and turned my homework in from that.

oh lord, the atari 600. lol. i used to drool over the 800, which i couldnt afford at the time

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Kraellin wrote: i used to drool over the 800

My real computer was the Heathkit et3400a. Now that was a personal computer.

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Kraellin wrote: have you tried out any of the hdri

I don't have the horsepower for rendering intensive applications. Right now I'm working on the underneath. Fortunately for me I imagine my creatures from the bones out so it has not been a problem.

Does your 8 mega pixel camera shoot raw?