Baby trips the light fantastic across the late-afternoon counter, headed for the cabinet where the kitty treats are stored. Note penny, bottom center, part of our "take" -- 21 cents -- during walkies today.
With the help and moral support of two of our geekier fans/fellow bloggers, we finally resolved that Photoshop cropping dilemma of the other day. In the way of blogging, Teresa of Technicalities -- who doesn't know Photoshop per se -- asked lots of intelligent questions and used the opportunity to make a good point about the untrustworthiness of photographic images as proof of anything but artistic prowess:
As for photoshopping pictures -- do you ever feel you just can't trust any picture you see now days? It's so easy to change things.
Yes, as we blogged here a few months back in "The uses and misuses of artistry." We remember fondly the pre-Photoshop days of our childhood when before-and-after images advertising some miracle beauty product or other in the back of movie magazines were blatantly manipulated and laughably labeled "photo unretouched." It became one of our favorite sisterly all-purpose expressions. It's much easier nowadays for a person with a few relatively easy-to-aquire keyboard skills to make things look -- to the untrained eye -- unretouched, which is one of the things we love best about Photoshop, of course.
Details of Baby steps from top photo illustrate the "Feather" feature of Photoshop that we discovered today thanks to Brian's shaking us out of the box to help figure out why we were suddenly unable to select and cut (Marquee feature) exactly the part of an image we wanted the other day. In left photo, "Feather" is set to 4 pixels, giving a fade-away effect to the edges, while at right it's set to the default 0 pixels, giving a sharp edge, enhanced with our signature outline and shadow.
Back to our cropping problem of the other day, where we selected a rectangle but captured only an approximation of what we selected. It was something blogfriend Brian of A Map of the Cat emailed that got us to thinking:
Are the Select menu options working?
A feather in our artist's beret, a Photoshop feature we'd never noticed before, "Feather" (left near top just under "File") allows you to control the sharpness or fuzziness of the edge of an image by typing in pixel size. Zero is the default, which renders a crisp edge as in the above right version of Baby paws. To get the screencapture above, we Googled and found what we were looking for at a click of the mouse: "Press Command (Apple)-Shift-4. The pointer turns into a bull's eye. Select the area of the screen you wish to capture. The screen is captured and saved as a PDF file called Picture 1 on your hard drive."
We'd never noticed before, but there along the menu-options bar along the top of the Photoshop window when you're in the marquee mode was a feature called "Feather" with 3 pixels typed in. We changed it to 0, which turned out to be the default, and were back in business.
Update: From Teresa in the comments:
Yay Brian! Good for him for pointing to the right thing. Sometimes the answer is easy, sometimes a process of elimination. Mostly it just takes perseverance.
Difference between a computer geek and everyone else . . . we just keep trying stuff until something works. *grin*
Salt of the earth, these computer geeks.
Update II: The Friday Ark is now boarding at Modulator.
The life of a blogger requires lots of adaption and vast patience to keep up with the evolving world of technology. We eighty-six-year-olds have to watch, wonder and admire.
Posted by: goomp | May 04, 2006 at 07:08 PM
Yay Brian! Good for him for pointing to the right thing. Sometimes the answer is easy, sometimes a process of elimination. Mostly it just takes perseverance.
Difference between a computer geek and everyone else... we just keep trying stuff until something works. *grin*
Posted by: Teresa | May 04, 2006 at 11:07 PM