This is a great article about a common problem, in fact I found it when I went on the net looking for, well, ways to use up the zucchini.
 http://www.wisebread.com/gadzukes-10-way…

And now ladies and gentlemen, the grand Finale.  Four pictures into one!! An additional two or three that I just took little bits from, and the earlier Tongue Affliction picture.  Of course MY camera decides not to work at all, so one of the residents took these pictures, and most of them were blurry.  There was a lot of blend-testing,  and it was minimally effective, but it was mainly cutting, pasting, and blurring.

First we start with the happiest resident ever.  It was a “Trip to New York” [props to Brenda at Bonham Nursing in Stillwater, she’s a pistol, and smart as a whip], and so this resident has BOTH a “feather in her cap” and an American Flag.

Then there was the rest of the audience, which had to be attached to the happy resident.

Then there was Sal, bless him, he even got up and danced but of course we didn’t get a picture of that!  But we did get him clappin’ along.  You’ll notice I flipped him.

The worst and most time consuming part of this was making the colors match.  It’s surprising how some pictures come out all in yellows and some pictures are all in blues.  Cold and warm colors, don’tcha know.

Layer levels can be adjusted, it makes a new layer and adjusts the hue, saturation, luminosity, and any other attribute you can think of.  This required a lot of playing around and now that I’m getting more advanced there isn’t a lot on the web to help me.  You’ll be surprised to hear, there are many minimally gifted people who randomly post YouTube videos telling you nothing you really want to know.  Besides, as one of my fellow students who is a graphic design MAJOR told me, tutorials are fine but you really don’t learn until you fool around with it.  What she didn’t say is I would waste HOURS and DAYS on it!  One of the files I saved was called “feets” because that one lady with the red-striped socks, her feet took literally HOURS to position properly.  And if you look close, they really aren’t.  I also spent a lot of time on that 60’s era floor, since the colors didn’t always match.  I found out the danger of cutting and pasting ad infinitum, because every time you paste something it creates a layer.  I think 35 layers is too many, but I was afraid to “flatten” them all because then they’d be lost.  Guess it depends on how left-brain of a thinker you are!

The only thing I took from this picture, to the left,  was the copier or whatever it is on the right.

The main thing that is different from the old way of doing things [mainly with an exacto-knife] is that you CAN adjust the colors, hue, saturation, luminosity, darkness, brightness, contrast to make pictures look like they were taken at the same time.

And what, exactly, did I learn?  That there are many, many hours in the day that the  youth of our nation can fritter away on the Internet.  That if you think our politicians have more ways than ever to “spin” themselves and their actions, you are right.  That we are all children of advertising and therefore don’t believe everything we see, even if it looks really, really good.

I still need 2 more pictures to complete my final project.  However the one that I already posted was the only, well, acceptable one.  But the solution is part and parcel of “Photoshop”…just get an image off the Internet, and stick yourself in!  I already knew how to do this from that aforementioned nice young man.

Easier said than done.  There’s a finite amount of pictures of me, and it took a long long time to find one I would fit in to.  Even then I had to flip it horizontally (under the “Image” menu).  There were other pictures but they were the wrong color…and yes, you can change that…or taken at facilities in Japan.  I have been doing this performing at facilities thing for about 20 years and in all that time I have seen MAYBE two or three people of Asian descent.  So those pics were out, too.  This was the only one that even remotely fit, it’s  from Florida but it couldn’t be helped. (How do I know it’s Florida?  Well I don’t, but I know damn well the elderly never EVER wear shoes like that, around here even if it’s 120 degrees).  I had to cut myself out of the picture, trim my horrible neck area, then insert myself into the now-horizontally flipped picture.  I actually succeeded in covering up dancer #2….dancer #1 just got cropped right out entirely.

I am really not satisfed with this picture…try & guess why…but even the Internet could not help me here.  My friend Tyler says I should put someone, preferably creepy, at that window to provide the audience with a reason why they’re looking there, and not at me!  I did take a couple of audience members from behind me, since they were kinda looking in my direction, and placed them up front next to the guy with the powder blue shirt.  That’s why that table looks so crowded.

By the way if you’re going to flip a picture make sure there’s nothing written visible because it will appear backwards.  This will make your viewers think you live in Bizzaro world.  Which I assuredly do.

Here is photoshop project number three. On Monday I played a gig at a facility in Wilkes Barre. I had my friend come and take pictures of me, and the audience. Unfortunately she was in a hurry, that has to be the only reason why there was no good picture of me with the audience. In fact there were only 3 pictures of me, each one was worse than the one before it. So I chose this one, with the tongue affliction. And I chose this audience picture, believing I could stick myself into the audience picture and make ‘em look like they were actually enjoying the performance. I needed to cut and paste myself out of this one, it’s actually pretty easy, like I did with the garlic heads. Resizing is the biggest pain about this, because at first I looked like the Giant 50 foot woman playing my keyboard.

And speaking of my keyboard, that was really hard, because the right side of it got cut off in the Tongue Afflication picture, so I kind of had to create more keyboard with the lasso tool. I must have cut out 100 images, at first I couldn’t get it to copy right, then it did but it never fit in once I moved my little copy over to the side of the keyboard. You’ll note it doesn’t really look right even now, but it’ll do. And then I had to literally turn frowns upside down. That was another Youtube trip, and some nice young man in Australia or New Zealand revealed to me “transform” under the “edit” menu. Voila! Some of the frowns I literally turned upside down, but most of them I just took a sample of the corner and “rotated” ‘em a bit. Then the ubiquitous Blur tool, to make them fit in. I finally learned how to “Liquify”, it’s under “Filter” and gently pushes things in. I wish there was some kind of tool like this in Life (yeah, it’s called dieting) but it took me several days to learn how to use it. There’s some kind of mesh underneath the picture and it compresses just those tiny squares of pixels. Another nice young man (how come they’re always guys) on YouTube called it How To Make Fat People Skinny. Ha!

Hey folks!  I grew some garlic—planted it last October, dug it up this week—and I took some pictures of it hanging up to dry, to show you.  Then I got an idea, a terrible, awful idea.  And here it is.  How did I do this evil deed, you may ask?

Simple.  I photoshopped the heads onto…the heads!!!  And yes, “photoshop” is a verb.  I tried the “clone stamp tool” since I figured that’s how you would copy something and paste it onto something else.  Not so.  I finally gave up after literally HOURS of trying to figure it out and put “how to photoshop someone into a picture” into the search engine, and voila!!  Youtube has a tutorial on every thing a human being can do, including this.  The nice sounding young man taught me how to copy and paste, resizing the photos as you go, and it couldn’t be simpler.  First you take the “lasso” tool and cut the thing out you want to put somewhere.  Then it will acquire what my professor calls the “marching ants” around just that part of the image you’ve drawn around.  Hit edit, then copy, and go to the garlic picture, and hit paste!  If it doesn’t fit, resize the original image, under “image size” and paste again.

Stupid Dan had red-eye in his picture, because no picture exists of him taken anywhere else but a bar.  So THAT was another hour, because despite the fact that my version of photoshop, CS2, is supposed to have a “red eye tool”, it doesn’t.  Or, at least I couldn’t find it.  So I gave up and found another picture of him.  Notice how he’s kind of transparent while the rest of us are solid.  I used the “polygonal” lasso tool on him, and the regular lasso tool on all the rest.  Hm.

Why is my head the biggest?  Because it’s my picture.  I call it “GarlicGuideHeads”.

The very first rock concert I ever attended was the Doobie Brothers in Kingston back in the 70’s. Great show, all the hits at least up to that point and I couldn’t hear for nearly two days after the show. I knew the band was out touring again this summer and would have loved to see them if someone had promoted their appearance in the area. Maybe it sold out and no promotion was required but I really don’t think that was the case. The local concert scene is busier than ever between shows at Montage, the casino, the arena, the SCC and the Kirby which is a good thing for music fans of NEPA. But you got to let us know….hit it up on Facebook, Tweet it, run some ads….you might even try smoke signals….just let the people know. If you book it….they will come, if they know about it.