Tag: Photoshop

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Cool Text Effects: Gallery Updates

Yeah! I got away from the seemingly endless photo-editing today and did some fun graphics. Here’s my Text Effects Gallery. Today I did The Spatter ones, the Comb and Drip, and TTYL. I did Comb and Drip by modifying the Type Path. I did the others with clipping groups and Lighting Effects.

Part of my struggle with this was in coming to grips with changes in the Lighting Effects “filter” in Photoshop. It just doesn’t seem as easy as it once was, and it likely isn’t. More powerful = more complicated = steeper learning curve.

What I should do pretty soon is to do a nice tutorial on using Lighting Effects to make cool Text Effects.

The TV room project is coming along again. Jack’s in there hammering right now, starting work on the 10′ piece that will be our TV stand / puzzle display case. I’m pretty excited to see all of this coming together.

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General myJanee.com News My Day Photoshop Travel Tales

More Travel Tales Uploaded

I’ve been working for a few days on updating Travel Tales, the travel section of my site. This section can always be found beginning either with myJanee.com or that menu at the top right > All Things Janee > Travel Tales.

What I’ve been working on is skeleton pages for 2014-20 and a start on 2019’s page. So far, none of my photos are attached to their bigger version, so content yourself with the thumbnails.

It’s been lots of fun to go through the photos and the accompanying memories. Here are just a few from the Travel Tales 2019:

at the North Dakota Capitol in Bismark
North Dakota
East College, DePauw University
Indiana
Falls of the Ohio State Park, Indiana
Indiana
Artichokes
Texas
Tower at the WWI Museum in Kansas City, MO
Missouri

In Photoshop news, I sent the “Feathers” triptych off to CanvasPop. We’ll see how they turn out, but they have good reviews, right out of the gate. Here’s my final result.

We are making real headway on our new TV room. I’m surprised at how much I like it, and how much more useful that space is, using it as our “family” room rather than a dining room.

What I did was to move the dining room to the middle section, the TV to the left section, and the living room to the right section of the great room. Great rooms are great, to be sure, but they do need to have sensible arranging. I’m learning new things!

Someday I want to compile pics of the various rooms I’ve designed and arranged and post them.

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My Day Photoshop

Strutting my stuff

Argh. Yeah. I’m not used to keeping my vehicles long enough to have stuff go wrong with them. And I’m used to having Hondas, which, in my experience, just don’t have much go wrong. So imagine my surprise when I discovered that the vexing noise in the back of my car was bad struts! That plus some brake work set me back $600.

And the RV is getting fixed, finally! My little altercation with the stop sign is costing the insurance company $30,000. I know, right? I’m really going to try hard not to do anything like that again. Lesson learned!

The TV room project turned into a bit longer one than we’d hoped for. We got the rug and the pad in and waited till Tuesday to put them in, because we had to move the furniture and clean and that was an empty day. So, furniture moved, we opened the pad and put it down. Cool.

Then we opened the rug. Buzzz! Wrong rug! Very wrong rug. The woman at Wayfair was very nice and assured us that we would have our right rug in around the end of the month. Urf. So we had to move the furniture all back onto our old rug.

The bright-colored abstract rug is now in the office and I like it here.

I’ve done a little art, but just a little. Here’s a look at my sketchpad:

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My Day Photoshop

Having Fun Making Art

My client wanted a triptych work done with maybe feathers, blues, and grays. Graphic art rather than photorealism. And here’s what I came up with. Client loves it and so do I!

If you’re curious about the spiritual meaning of a blue jay feather, Symbolshub has your answer.

In other news, we’re coming closer to having our lighting done in our TV room — that side of our great room where the TV lives. When we have it done, I’ll post a picture here.

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General myJanee.com News Janee's Galleries My Day Travel Tales

Many miles traveled; Milestone Reached!

Yeah! I’ve gotten as far as I can get with the State Capitol project for now. All of the states for which I have photos are posted. There are still two states for which Jack has photos and I do not — Indiana and Wisconsin, since I accidentally formatted my card before getting the pix off. (Bad idea. Don’t do that.)

And there are still 8 states for which we have not been to the capitol. I hope you will go there and look at my pics and that you like one or two of them! I still can’t believe how much work I’ve gotten done through this spring and summer.

Now I can get into some less mundane work. I know, what could possibly be more exciting than editing 1500 or so pictures and getting them saved for the web and posted on each of these 42 pages, right?

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General myJanee.com News My Day Photoshop Travel Tales

More thrilling happenings at myJanee.com!

Nebraska is posted along with all 29 of the photos that I chose! As with all of them, Nebraska’s is a very interesting Capitol building, but this one has some particular allure. I wrote a bit about it in my commentary following the pictures.

And I posted Iowa! Probably the hardest part of this project is culling through the dozens of photos to find what I deem worth posting here. While I do not claim to be a photographer, I do love taking pictures. Now and then, I come up with something that’s almost good!

Just posted Delaware and Florida. I’m on fire today!

I don’t do significant Photoshop editing for most of these — Perspective Crop on many, Levels Adjustment Layer for most, and Smart Sharpen on all. There are a few that I do some cloning to take away a car or an obvious flaw. And sometimes, I do something like remove scaffolding!

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General myJanee.com News My Day Travel Tales

Alaska Page Added: Alaskans are “frankly amazed” at the quality of the page

Yeah! I added Alaska! The capitol is … not very nice, but it’s there. I posted a few trail pix, too, just so the page would have some color.

In going through my Alaska pics, I found that I had many other non-Alaska pics in there. And I had a ton of extraneous non-whale pics. These are pics that one shoots when one is trying to get a pic of an actual whale, but then it dives under.

Today I’m working on photos for Kansas’ page. If I do “just” one state a day, I’ll be done in just 50 days!

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Janee's Galleries My Day Photoshop Travel Tales

New Artwork! New Links! Still zero visitors!

LOL that headline got a score of 74/100. Today I did some more art! And I finished up with my Archive Tutorial updating project! If you should happen to be reading this, should happen to go to my Archive Tutorials and find a link that needs to be fixed, please use the Contact Janee link above to find me and tell me.

So in my updating, I am reminded of what an amazing body of work lies in my tutorials. Not only did I work very hard on them, but they are quite good! Of course, a few things have changed while I was away, but just a few.

So here’s the image that I’m about to post in my Text Effects gallery. I can’t even link to it, because it’s not even a page yet!

Hey! We finally got an estimate for our RV’s boo-boo. The cheap fix, which leaves out the minor scratches on the side, which we figure we would do in the first year from tree branches anyway, and the back storage door, is north of $6500. The good-to-go ready-to-put-on-the-sales-lot estimate is north of 11,000.

The good news is that State Farm will not be re-rating us for this, since we have been such amazing accident-free and reliable-pay customers for … nearly 40 years. So now I have to figure out which way to go. Maybe I’ll ask on Facebook. Those folks seem to know everything. And I did. The consensus is to go on and have the whole thing fixed. An insurance guy said that it doesn’t matter to the insurance co if it’s 6500 or 11000 – a claim is a claim!

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Photoshop Photoshop Tutorial Announcement

Destructive and Non-Destructive Editing in Photoshop

If you’ve spent any time in the Photoshop groups, you’ve surely been shamed once or twice for “destructive editing.” Well, if not, then, if you’re doing these destructive practices, they were thinking of shaming you!

Here’s a rundown of what’s what:

DestructiveNon-Destructive
Making an adjustment through a menu commandUsing an Adjustment Layer
Erasing part of your image layerUsing a Layer Mask
Painting on your image layerPainting on another layer over your image
Cloning onto your image layer“Use all layers” cloning onto a new layer
Using Dodge, Burn, Sponge, Healing Tool, or Patch on the image layer Using one of these tools on a Merged Visibles layer
Applying a Filter to your imageFiltering a duplicated layer of your image
Flattening your imageMaking a Merged Visibles layer

A Merged Visibles Layer is a shortcut I came up with. I don’t know if anyone else is doing them now.

What you do is to make all the layers visible that you want in this new layer. Anything you don’t want visible, turn off the visibility eye. In the Layers palette, click the top-most of your visible layers.

Now hold Ctrl-Alt-Shift and type E. (Note: some of my tutorials refer to CAS-NE or Ctrl-Alt-Shift-N-E. You used to need the N. Now PS automatically puts the merged visibles onto its own layer.)

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My Day WordPress

Some amazing tutorials found!

Not that they were lost, but I’ve been working on updating my Archive Tutorials so that their links all work. It’s a bigger job than it sounds like, because I have many, many tutorial pages and the ones of which I speak are all in HTML. Soooo bleah. HTML coding, copy-pasting, over and over.

I’m within spitting distance of finishing this project, though, so I can once again be proud of this amazing body of work — my Archive Tutorials! While these are not linked directly to this blog, you can get back here from the main header menu — any of those links — and then the menu at the upper right. I’m still working on navigation.

And, in other adulting news, Jack and I went to get our flu shots and shingles: part II shots today. Woo hoo! I was so happy to get that done that I came home and had two of Jack’s chocolate chip, coconut cookies with peanut butter spread on them, and a big glass of milk. So much for adulting, then, right?

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My Day

No Adulting for Me Today

It’s Sunday! Today I reworked my Celtic 3-heart knot and made it into white, yellow and rose gold! Click the image to the right to see this in its full-blown glory.

I counted up the archive tutorial pages that are still in need of updating. LOL I still, after all of the work I’ve done on this thankless task, have 58 more to update. Ugh. Naturally, I’m thinking of ways to speed this up, batch process, or whatever, but I’m coming up blank.

If I do 6 a day, I’ll be done in 10 days, anyway. And those 10 days will be over at the same time, no matter what I do!

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Janee's Galleries My Day Travel Tales

New Celtic Knot Artwork on Display

I usually like to swallow the toad early in the day, but today, I began by doing the fun stuff. Then I swallowed some toads this afternoon.

What fun? I got into a few more Celtic knot adventures, and came up with an original! This one represents Janee, Jack, and Jodie, all of our hearts interwoven and bound together with a ring of love. Ok, all together now: AWWWW!

This afternoon, I did some work with updating my Archive tutorials. I know I was going to just leave the archived ones un-updated, but I just couldn’t stand having dead links in them.

I got as far as Pen 2, which means that I got into the HTML and edited EIGHT of these today.

The other toad I swallowed was this: I set up the recurring payments for the RV, so it won’t be repossessed before it gets out of the shop. :/ I know that someday I’ll look back on this and think, “Was there some reason that we didn’t just go off on a trip in 2020 — the hottest summer EVER in Phoenix?
What stopped us?”

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My Day Travel Tales

New Art on Display

Yay! It’s about time I did something creative that I can actually post. Today I finished a piece of Celtic knot art. It’s in Photoshop, of course, and I did it all in vectors this time around. And I did it all mathematically, so that it’s pretty regular. This is on display in my Geometrics Gallery.


So what else is new? I just noticed that my blog entries are no longer showing a date! I will fix that.

I’m done grousing about how bad video tutorials are, and I’m welcoming the present into my life. To be more precise, while I’m not buying into the idea that print is dead, I’m going to make some video tutorials and get set to teach some video classes.

I need to get a camera, and I’m in negotiations with the man who shares my house as to which one to get. I’m usually one to spend nearly as much as I can, and I like to have the good one. Jack is ok with spending as little as possible and then buying another in 3 months, when it’s obvious that the cheap one isn’t good.

I’ve done some more research, jumping down interesting rabbit holes, and have added more links to my Photoshop Resource Links pages.

Still no word on whatever astronomical estimate we’re going to get for our new RV. I’m still hopeful for a November get-away, but as that month comes closer, I’m less sure that it can happen. We’ll just have to wait and see what happens.

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My Day Photoshop Tutorial Announcement WordPress

All New Tutorial on Vector and Raster Files

I have just posted a much-improved redo of my “What’s the Vector, Victor?” Tutorial. This one goes into much more depth with file types and how to save each type of file. There have actually been new developments while I was away, so I got to learn new things. I went down many different rabbit holes! The tutorial is here!

Everything is coming along on my website. I continue to be amazed at how far I’ve come in such a short time. In recent days, I’ve done more work on my Photoshop Resource Links adding more links as I discover them. Today and yesterday, I found six new links to great sites which taught me about file types!

I have learned, at last, how to actually use a reusable block in WordPress! You convert it to a regular block. That’s done by clicking the thing next to the block at the top.

I learned about groups of blocks. And I now have a template of a group of blocks that I can summon up for new tutorials!

WordPress still remains a pretty complicated and fiddly thing. And the page size seems enormous. But it’s what all the cool people are doing now, so here we are!

I’m exploring the notion of teaching at one of the many online schools that have cropped up while I was sleeping. I surely wish that I could be part of a school that, if not accredited, was at least known to be good. I do know that there are many out there who are professing to be good teachers who just are not.

And I just found another rabbit hole — LinkedIn. This is all stuff that wasn’t even a thing when I went away.

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My Day Photoshop Tutorial Announcement WordPress

New Head-Swapping Tutorial Announced

Yes! I’ve written a new tutorial! This one is on head-swapping, but it really involves more than just a head. It’s quite a piece of work, if I do say so myself. In this tutorial, I take parts out of four photos, each of which has a problem, and I make one decent portrait of the whole family. This tutorial can be found at this link.

One thing that’s different about this one is that it’s more of a show-off tutorial, because the student’s photos will almost certainly have issues that are different from those in my photo.

A couple of resources that helped me today:

Web Page Word Counter

View Post

Creating and using a Reusable Block in WordPress

In other news, damage of our RV is still being estimated. This doesn’t excite me much.

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My Day Photoshop Tutorial Announcement

New Tutorial is out now!

I got creative this morning, and made you an all new Photoshop tutorial! This one is Breaking out of a Frame, and features this beautiful dog, Rhett, who belongs to a friend from one of my FB groups.

Click my picture at the right to see Rhett in all his beautiful glory, as he jumps right out of the picture in this gallery.

In other news, our beautiful saguaro cactus which adorned our yard for probably 37 years before we even got here, fell down in a stiff wind on Saturday night. I cried. Our landscaper Jose took it the rest of the way out yesterday. $400.

Other than that, and the fact that it’s hellishly hot, things are fine here. Well, there is the mysterious water in the garage, but it has stopped for the time being, so we’re hopeful that it… healed itself?

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My Day

All new Photoshop Art: Geometrics Gallery Revealed!

I was busy yesterday! I did some new art and I posted a new Geometrics Gallery! This piece is reminiscent of one I did for the cover of Photoshop Elements Most Wanted in 2002.

I’m eager to be useful. I want people to discover my work and to see that I offer good instruction that will make them into real Photoshop artists.

Mostly I want people to be able to learn Photoshop, instead of just watching other people do it. Sure, many people enjoy those cooking shows, where you watch other people cook. But, if you really want to make something, you’re searching online for a written recipe, or you’re going to your cookbook collection.

Which brings me to another complaint I have about the ubiquitous youtube tutorials: Many are just a recipe for some effect. The goal is the effect and not in teaching anything outside of that particular effect. Whine. LOL.

Today I did some more site tidying. I have been working on my Photoshop Resource Links, getting rid of dead stuff and adding new good links. I’m also working toward getting all of this stuff onto the WordPress arm of my site.

And, of course, I did some more Jodie-art!

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My Day

New YouTube Artwork

Today I did some touchups of my site, fixing some dead links and nosing around some old dead parts of my site. It seems that my site has so many rabbit holes into which I am prone to fall!

Today I read all of my class descriptions and procedures. I will do things a little bit differently next time, but it’s mostly good. I reread the comments that I’d posted from my students about the classes and it made me eager to get in and teach again.

I did some art! This was for my YouTube banner. They say how large to make the art and in what aspect ratio, so it sounds easy. I made my file, created my art, and uploaded it.

Too big. Nothing showed except the very center. So I found another dimension in another place. Too small. So I moved things around so that I thought it might work, and it seems to work. Above is the way I wanted the image to be.

Below is how it is, except that they chop off most of it, so all you get is just barely above the text and not down to the purple line. Oh well.

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My Day Photoshop Tutorial Announcement

New Video Tutorial: Pearly Button

I just finished and uploaded another video tutorial: Creating a Pearly Button in Photoshop. I’m still working on fine-tuning, and there’s still much to be learned about the inner workings of Camtasia, but I’ll get there.

I also figured out how to upload to YouTube. Most people are searching YouTube for tutorials, so it’s where all the cool people are these days.

I did a bit of art!

It remains idiotically hot here. If I ever say anything like “I’d like to stay in Sun Lakes this summer,” I want you to just shoot me.

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My Day Photoshop Tutorial Announcement

I got Camtasia! Is it contagious?

Can Janee-video-tutorials be far behind? The very cool thing is that TechSmith actually remembered me from 14 years ago! If you search YouTube for myjanee, you can still see the 4 short tutorial clips I made back in ’06. I just have to get over this sort of shyness that I seem to have now.

I have Camtasia installed, my headset installed, my Photoshop open, and I’m ready to do a test video. And I’m nervous….

And, it turns out, with good reason! You know how sometimes you have a day when nothing works on the first try? Well, I’m having one of those. And Camtasia is not working for me yet. I am thinking that it’s my version that’s very old and I have to buy the upgrade. Trying to get answers on the forums…. ugh.

This comes after I spent an hour on the phone trying to get hold of the AZ DMV about a registration refund. Finally a most helpful woman got me taken care of, so that worked. Well, maybe I’ll try that upgrade and see if I can make it work.

Grrrr…. and, in yet another chapter of “Golly, nothing is working today,” I updated Camtasia, made what seems like an ok video, and… can’t get it to upload to YouTube.

Ok, I finally made it work! Woo hoo! Time to quit! But here’s the link with the two videos embedded! Copying a Logo in Photoshop