Vignettes

There are several meanings to the word “vignette”. One sense is a decorative design. In optics, vignetting means incomplete coverage of an image and the subsequent darkening of edges.

Many photo editing applications provide a collection of effects that can be applied. “Vignette” is one of those effects. Picasa includes this effect.

Having spent a good share of my working career in the photography industry, I have great resistance to applying this effect to a photo. I have admired the lengths optical designers have gone to to reduce or eliminate vignetting and been astonished at the optical tricks – pardon the expression – that have been employed. It seems heretical to undo their hard work intentionally.

Yet, some photos lend themselves to manipulation to bring out the feeling of the image that the straight photo cannot relate as well. I applied other effects to reduce the detail and bring out just form and color to the images here. Primarily these were “painting” effects. Turns out that the additional use of vignettes to darken the edges seemed rather pleasing. The blending into darkness of the edges seems to bring out the light and make the images more luminous and more inviting than the straight photos.

The images are more impressive when displayed large. Click on the images to see them in a post on Silver Canvas.

 

My Way

 

Flower

 

Fallen Leaves

 

Fall Bossoms

 

Time of Plenty

 

.:.

© 2011 Ludwig Keck

Technorati Tags: Photography,digital images,effects,artistic effects,image manipulation,vignetting,vignette

SkyDrive Slide Shows once more

SkyDrive continues to get improved, sometimes large steps with fanfare, at other times small incremental upgrades. Self-running slide shows are once again available.
Last July I lamented the loss of self-running slide shows in SkyDrive (Slideshows and the new SkyDrive). The upgrade in November 2011 restored that feature. It is now not quite as nice. The old Silverlight version provided pleasant surround shades and could be launched from the link. The current version is plainer looking and requires the viewer to click on a “Play slide show” link.
Here, to test the present implementation, is a photo collage that links to an album with these photos. Be sure to click the “Play slide show” link in the upper right area to start the show. This post, coming just after the holidays in early January 2011, uses food photos – what else? They have been accumulated over the past months for another project, but seemed just yummy for this post illustrating the SkyDrive slide show feature.
Note: Some of the photos load faster than others – there is a mix of resolutions for testing quality and speed.

By the way, the little bug demonstrated in my video in that July post has also been corrected. Thank you Microsoft!
For other recent improvement to SkyDrive, please see SkyDrive improves file and folder management (over at This ‘n That).

.:.

© 2011 Ludwig Keck

Technorati Tags: photography,digital photography,digital imaging,slide show,SkyDrive,Windows Live SkyDrive

Happy Holidays!

Once again this year I prepared an image to share, and to wish all my friends and readers a joyful holiday season. You have already seen it in the post Image Trickery, but click it again here for a larger view in Gallery Ludwig.

One card just is not enough, so here is another version that I used in a Senior Academy workshop article.

Happy holidays and all the best to you!

Ludwig

.:.

© 2011 Ludwig Keck

Image Trickery

Pictures don’t lie, but they sure can tell tales! They can also serve as the basis for interesting, personal art. “Artistic effects” – tools offered in Microsoft Office 20110 applications – can transform otherwise uninspiring photographs into amazing images.
In other posts I described a number of these tools, in this article I want to take up some of the more unusual effects that are available and further show how you can combine effects for even more effects.
To start here is a mosaic, or “tiled”, picture of a robin. The pixelation effect is called “Light Screen” in “Picture Tools”. It is very dependent on the size of the original image, to get just the right tile spacing may require scaling the photo before inserting it into a Word, Excel, or PowerPoint document. This effect was not very impressive when applied to the original photo, so I first used another effect, “Plastic Wrap”. I saved that effect (right-click > “Save as picture…”). “Plastic Wrap” is a rather neat effect, but doing this to a robin might get me in trouble with the animal protection folks. Really, no creature war harmed!
Let’s turn to a less controversial photo subject, a bunch of leaves. Here I applied “Mosaic Bubbles”. The illustration here is a small portion to show the bubbles better. Now, how about a plastic wrap on this one?
Again a cutout is used to show the effect better in this small blog.
This makes for a totally different look, the bubbles are still there but now they look collapsed and the whole surface is shiny.
How can you use this effect, or effect combination? Well, that all depends on you, the artist. If you like it, it is good.
Now, let’s continue with the trickery. I will stick to my leaves and add a twist.
First some posterizing using the “Cutout” effect. Then, to make it more like a drawing, I add edges with the “Photo Copy” tool. In an earlier article I demonstrated the “Photo Copy” effect – like a very old-fashion copy machine from decades ago. With a good bit of transparency this gives a nice print, or wall paper, effect.



The three images here show the progression so far. Remember, after each effect is applied, the image is saved. The image is then replaced in Word with the saved one. This is the way to add effect upon effect.
Now I will roll out the canvas and use the “Texturizer” effect. To continue the trickery I load another image, this one of a small snake, and remove everything but the snake with the “Remove Background” tool. Setting both images to “Text Wrap – Tight” allows one image to be freely dragged over the other one. Here is the result:

One final trick. In Word not only can you superimpose one image on another, you can do the same with text. A picture of an old cabin serves as the base, I won’t tell you all of the effects applied because I lost count, trying one, then another until I was happy with the result. However, the last and predominant effect is “Glow Edges”. Text uses a “Text Effect” to put the glow around the letters.

My best wishes to all for a joyous and happy Holiday Season!
Hope you can spare some time to take some great photos, and maybe use these tools to have fun with your pictures.
“Artistic Effects” in the Microsoft Office 2010 applications were demonstrated in these other articles:

• Painting with Word – the “Paint Brush”, “Marker”, and “ Watercolor Sponge” effects.
• Doodling in Office – pencil and drawing effects.
• Excel in Art – the effects called “Cement”, “Glass”, “Glow Edges”, and “Cutout”.

.:.

Technorati Tags: Digital images,photography,image manipulation,artistic effects,Microsoft Office 2010,Word 2010,Excel 2010,PowerPoint 2010

© 2011 Ludwig Keck

Excel in Art

Of course, you can! But this is not about helping you to the pinnacle as an artist, this article is really about “Art in Excel”, Microsoft Office 2010 Excel to be a little more specific. Like Word and PowerPoint, Excel provides the same “Picture Tools” with, among many other options, “Artistic Effects”.
Painting and drawing transformations were discussed in earlier posts (see bottom of article). Here I wish to take up a few of the more unusual and interesting effects.
Before I dive in, there are some technical details I must cover. When applying the artistic effects in Office application only one can be used. So you select the one you want and that’s it. There is also the question of how you get your masterwork out of the program. There is a bit of bad news, but first the good news. In Word 2010 just right-click the modified image. The new menu has an option “Save as Picture…” with permits you to save the image in its original size – full resolution.
This option is not available in either Excel 2010 or PowerPoint 2010. In those applications you can use only “Copy”. This command is like doing a screen capture of just the picture, the copied image is just the displayed size. So you must make sure that you have displayed the image in a sufficient size on your monitor to get adequate resolution.
Many of the effects are sensitive to the size of the inserted picture. The effects typically are less effective on large photos and show up much more noticeably on smaller images.

The illustration above uses the “Glass” effect on the photo of the flower. The effect is adjustable in “Scaling” which was set to 100 for both the larger image (inserted from the original size) and the smaller image which was reduced in size prior to being inserted. You can see the marked difference. This does provide you with wider options for creating your art.
Lets look at a different effect on this same set of photos: “Glow Edges”.

Once again you can see the different “effectiveness'’. Both images use the default setting of “Smoothness” of 3 (scale ranges to 10) with 15% transparency.
An effect that I find particularly appealing and useful is “Cutout” which is more commonly known as “posterizing”. This effect translates a photo into graphic areas as they might be used in a poster painting. Here is a picture that shows that effect well. You can select “Number of shades” from 0 to 6. This image uses 3 “shades”.
A little higher up, I slipped in one other effect, “Cement”. That effect makes a photo look like it was printed on a rough cement surface. There is also a canvas type “Texturizer” surface offered.
Now with all these art tools in Excel is there any reason to think that you cannot excel in art?
Some of the other “artistic effects” available in the Office programs are discussed in other posts in this small series:

• Painting with Word – the “Paint Brush”, “Marker”, and “ Watercolor Sponge” effects.
• Doodling in Office – pencil and drawing effects
• Image Trickery – effects “light Screen”, “Mosaic Bubbles”, “Plastic Wrap”, “Texturizer”, and combining of effects.

.:.

Technorati Tags: Digital images,photography,image manipulation,artistic effects,Microsoft Office,Word 2010,Excel 2010,PowerPoint 2010

© 2011 Ludwig Keck

Doodling in Office

Like many others I have spent way too much time in boring meetings and my pencil – instead of taking notes –  “pursued artistic license”. Maybe that is the reason for the neat “artistic effects” provided in Microsoft Office 2010 products like Word, Excel, and PowerPoint.
Several of these effects transform a photo or other inserted picture, into renderings that look as if they were done in pencil, pastel, or chalk. These media and one other effect, “Photo copy”, are the topic of this article.

Let me use one of my hawk pictures to illustrate some of the effects.

Here, in order from left to right, is a “Pastels Smooth”, “Pencil Grayscale”, “Line Drawing”, and “Pencil Sketch”. The effects can be adjusted, for example in pencil size in the “Pencil Grayscale” effect can be set from “0” to “100”. The four examples in the composite here were made with settings of 1, 11, 20, and 100 from left to right.

Other effects are similarly adjustable. As you would expect, some settings are more appealing than others depending on the original picture.
All of the effects offer “transparency”.  The transparency setting allows more or less of the original picture to show through. The illustrations above were all made with the setting at zero.Letting some of the original show works better for some effects than others.
I particularly like the “Photo copy” effect with some transparency. This effect emulates photo copies of days gone by when copies of photos showed just strong outlines in black or white. Here is the original photo, a couple of “photo copies” with no transparency and “detail” of 2 and 6, and the last one at detail set to 10 (the maximum setting) and transparency at 60 (percent).

Another effect is “Chalk Sketch”. I am showing here the effect with the Pressure” set at 3 (the range is 0 to 4) and transparencies of  0, 30, 50, and 70.

You can see how this wide range of possibilities can help you get an illustration just right for what you would like to do.
Some of the other “artistic effects” available in the Office programs are discussed in other posts in this small series:

• Painting with Word – the “Paint Brush”, “Marker”, and “ Watercolor Sponge” effects.
• Excel in Art – the effects called “Cement”, “Glass”, “Glow Edges”, and “Cutout”.
• Image Trickery – effects “Light Screen”, “Mosaic Bubbles”, “Plastic Wrap”, “Texturizer”, and combining of effects.

.:.

Technorati Tags: Digital images.,photography,image manipulation,artistic effects,Microsoft Office,Word 2010,Excel 2010,PowerPoint 2010

© 2011 Ludwig Keck