Notes In The Left Margin: Graphics

I'm changing this section of the blog, in particular this page, to focus on anything related to graphics or video. If over time there is enough content I will break it off into a separate site. But for now this is really the "Experimenter's corner". The original "Art Deco Gladioli" article is still here at the bottom of the page.

Running Clouds video clip

While strolling through a local park the other day it struck me how still the sparse clouds appeared to be. Since I needed some practice with my new video software I thought "Let's point the camera skyward and see what happens over time."

Well, apparently a lot goes on… This is 7 minutes spend up to 40 seconds. I simply tilted the seat back in my high end electric wheelchair and shot. I was so focused on the clouds and blue sky that I didn't even notice the plane that flew right through the scene. Keep a watchful eye on the bottom of your screen at the very beginning of the video, the plane zipped through the scene in probably 30 seconds of real time which here is only a few seconds. If you blink you will miss it

The camera was a Canon PowerShot SX620 HS a simple "point and shoot". The video was accelerated and the saturation boosted using Corel Video Studio 2020 Ultimate. Originally shot in 1920 x 1080, but reduced to 720 for the blog. The soundtrack is from the Corel copyright free library contained in the same software. Just a goofy experiment.

Patrick Clark

Art Deco Gladioli

As promised on Facebook last night, here is how I stumbled across the creation of the "Art Deco Gladioli". It doesn't matter what kind of photo or graphic software you have, most have the feature called "layering" which allowed me to accidentally create the image. I was literally just playing around with the photo, checking out new software features when my hand slipped…

Original photo

Here's the original photo I took a few weeks ago. I loaded it into my Paint Shop Pro 2020 Ultimate photo software and separated the flower from the background. It is common practice to "layer" each major change to a photo. In the same way old cartoonist would draw animation each image drawn on onion paper all layered together so they could see the minor changes. In software you can move layers around by dragging and dropping and do all sorts of interesting things.

Transparent
background

With the flower separated, in a layer, from the from the rest of the original image the area where the background was becomes transparent. In the image left, that's
represented by the checkerboard background.

Antique fabric

I thought for a little while about what to put in the background and it occurred to me something antique might look very nice. Way back in 2001 I had done a website for my dear friend Lauren using for the background a modified image of some antique fabric she had.

Antique background

Not bad, but it still needed something. We were up to two layers now, the flower overlaid on the background, offscreen I could see the little pancake stack of thumbnails showing up.


Retro-Pop styled

A new feature in the program was to convert a photo to a painting. All one had to do was pick a style. "Retro-Pop" looked excellent, so I let the program do its thing, and after a few seconds it created a new layer. All I had to do was place it at the top of the pancake stack and I would be done.

Final Picture

Accept my hand slipped placing the new layer in the stack. Instead of the image being at the top of the pile, it went to the bottom with the original flower and its transparent background precisely masking the transformed flower but letting the rest of the background coming through.

… And that was when I said wow! This was definitely a fun accident.

If this sounds confusing, below is a timeline of the image transformation steps. It should make things a little clearer.

Steps, start to finish.

Here is a link to the original size photos on my Google Drive.
Take care Patrick

License: Non Commercial
No Derivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)

Yahoo, it's the beloved weekend! Here's a few free photos.

I can't think of much to write today. Myself and my brain are just not in that space.

Although usually I can come up with something to say almost instantly today, for whatever reason-The Rabbits Just Aren't There (and I have no idea what I mean by that last statement, because it just occurred to me and since I do most of my typing by voice dictation it just came out and I think it sounds rather cool.)

So for today I am just going to post some pictures I've taken over the years using various cameras and edited with Corel PaintShop Pro Ultimate. (Software publishers site.) If anything strikes your fancy you are free to download it and use it as you wish. I hereby declare that anything you see in this post which is using this domain is in the public domain.

I do have a few photographs for purchase up on Displate. If you've never heard of this company they print artwork on metal with the result being that the posters are held on the wall by simple magnets. They ship all over the world.

Okay here in no particular order are a few photos taken over the years.

All but the last one, which is a picture of the Sun Tower taken in Vancouver are in their original full-size files. Simply click on the photo. Unfortunately the original of the Sun Tower has been lost to time.

The photos were taken across the lifespan of three cameras: (Links to the Canon Camera Museum.)

Enjoy your weekend and continue to have a great day.

Patrick

PS: This post will scroll off the front page of the blog in about 10 days. If you would like to revisit it easily click this link and bookmark the resulting page. Tip:All posts can be permanently bookmarked in your browser by clicking on their title and then bookmarking their own webpage. You will know you have the correct page when you see only one article.