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.

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!

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”.

OK folks here’s the new improved picture.  I used the “Auto Levels” since I’m sure the computer knows better than I do what the picture should look like.  Used the “spot healing tool” on the neck, makes me look 15 years younger, don’tcha think?  Course if I WAS 15 years younger I’d be illegal.

More pics next week.

Anyway YOU, dear reader, are going to learn along with me.  So here we go.  To the left of the actual working area is the TOOLBAR, this is your God.  Lookit all the stuff you can do!  OK, so I don’t know what half of it means.  But I like the sound of “blur”, “spot healing” and “slice.”  Sounds more like plastic surgery!  I actually photoshopped this image–the words in that turquoise color are the ones I put in there.  I tried to make the words black but gave up out of annoyance.  I feel that this will happen often during my learning experience.  The tool thingies with no word next to them, means I really didn’t understand what it does so I left it blank.

Now here’s the first picture I’m gonna mess with.  Yes, yes, I know, never take a picture with someone 30 years younger than yourself.  Oh well.  First thing to do is get that neck taken care of.  Which tool, blur, stamp, spot healing?  Tried the clone stamp tool…that’s supposed to take something from somewhere else, copy it, and put it where you tell it to.  Didn’t work, neck still awful.  This is gonna take a long, long time.  I’ll post the results in ten years when I figure this thing out.

By the way his name is Shane and he can really shred on guitar!  Come see us, Sept 18, it’ll be a Rock Mass at Gate of Heaven church in Dallas.  And staytooned for the new, improved pic, once I get finished with it!

Different kind of beans, called Contender.  Open pollinated, which means I will save the seeds for next year.  Yea, you’re supposed to save the EARLIEST and BIGGEST but I can’t help it, when the tiny new ones first appear I just munch away.  Hell, that’s what I GREW ‘em for!!  These did way better than the Blue Lake, the groundhogs apparently either couldn’t find them or didn’t like them as much.  I’ve already caught 4 groundhogs by the way, with my Havaheart trap, and released them all into the wild

The new secondary garden, for extra corn (Stowell’s Evergreen and of course Silver Queen) and pumpkins, which you can’t see, and canteloupes.  Have never had much luck with the winter squashes.  I think our season is just a leeeetle too short.  However, this is the first year I’ve seen squash bugs.  Even if the season is long enough, the squash bugs will probably get ‘em, even though every morning I go out and pop all the eggs, and try & find the parents. Little b-words!!

Ooops.  This isn’t my garden, it’s Gogol Bordello last month at Appel Farm in Elmer, NJ.  I really enjoyed ‘em but the REAL fans said it was a rather subdued show.  I’ll tellya, that Eugene Hutz is ka-ray-zee!!!  And awesome.

Coal Town Rounders
Larry Stephenson
The String Band
Hickory Project
Larry Gillis
Cabinet
Remington Ryde

www.nepabluegrass.com

Saturday June 18th Honesdale Roots & Rhythm Festival

Dave Alvin (from the Blasters)
Seth Walker
Ryan Hartt and the Blue Hearts
 http://honesdalerootsandrhythm.com

July 8 and 9

Briggs Farm Blues Fest

Terry “Harmonica” Bean
Lonnie Shields
Jimmy “Duck” Holmes
Alexis P. Suter Band
Eli Cook
Mark Armstrong
Vandelay Industries
 http://briggsfarm.com

July 30 and 31 Pennsylvania Blues Festival, Blue Mountain Ski Area

Cyrill Neville
Bettye Lavette
Lil’ Ed & The Blues Imperials
Magic Slim & the Teardrops
Kenny Neal
Shemekia Copeland
www.skibluemt.com/SkiBlue/activities/pa-blues-fest.aspx

August 5,6,7  Scranton Jazz Festival

The Four Freshmen
The Royal Scam
The Marko Marcinko Latin Jazz Quintet
War

www.scrantonjazzfestival.org

August 5-14 Musikfest in Bethlehem
Stone Temple Pilots
Maroon 5
Steve Miller Band
Alison Krauss & Union Station featuring Jerry Douglas
Steely Dan
Straight No Chaser
Buckcherry
Nick Jonas
Train with Gavin DeGraw
 http://www.musikfest.org

August 18,19,20,21 Philadelphia Folk Festival
Dan Bern
Tom Paxton
Tom Rush
Jorma Kaukkonen
David Bromberg Big Band
Arlo Guthrie
 http://www.pfs.org/folk-festival