I’m cutting back the elder bush which has shot up this summer in the hedge beyond the herb bed. It’s so tall that even I needed the stepladder to reach it.
Experimenting with the ‘Art’ filter of my Olympus E-M10II camera, I thought that the trellis, ladder and ivy looked rather Victorian, so I used the camera’s built-in pinhole camera art filter.
In Photoshop, I used various filters to give the feel of a deguerrotype: Lens Flare and Dust & Scratches, followed by Sepia Toning from the Actions Palette.
There was no lens flare in my original, but I thought a light shining brightly through the herbage at the top of a ladder would be a suitably biblical reference for a Victorian photograph.
Admittedly, Fox Talbot wouldn’t have had access to a Black & Decker 3-in-1 aluminium ladder.
Reading back through that, I’ve only just realised why the Dust & Scratches filter didn’t add a distressed vintage patina to the photograph!
Photoshop v. Affinity Photo, round two
I’m currently using the latest version of Photoshop, CC 2018, on a week’s free trial and enjoying it so much that I think that I’ll subscribe to the program (you can’t buy it outright). Everything is pretty much where it was in my 2010 version of Photoshop, CS5.1.
For instance, I feel at home being able to export my image using the Save for Web dialogue that I’ve been familiar with for the last twenty years. Adobe now refer to this as ‘Save for Web (Legacy)’, a blunt reminder that this is the old-fashioned way to do things: I’m also trying Dreamweaver CC 2018 on a week’s free trial and I realise that preparing images for the multiple platforms of the web – phone, tablet and desktop; HD and 4K – is now a much more sophisticated process.
I enjoyed using Affinity Photo as an alternative to my old version of Photoshop but after a week or two I still haven’t got quite up to speed with it. Much as I don’t like the concept of renting software, the £50-a-month Creative Cloud deal that Adobe offer is going to give me the latest versions of the three programs that – on many occasions over the past twenty years – I’ve used on a daily basis: Photoshop, Dreamweaver and InDesign. As part of the deal there are a dozen other tempting creative programs that I’d have access to, covering film, audio, animation, 3D and vector graphics. How could I resist?
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