Picture of swans at twilight with reflection of setting sun added

Metallic Ice effect from Irfanview

I do not get in here as often as I should. When I do I audibly gasp at the wonders herein!

I picked up a tip in a magazine that moving the camera downwards or upwards when taking a photo can produce interesting results. I've tried this a few times and have mostly ended up with blurred uninteresting pictures. This photo of some trees is probably the best I've managed so far.



Very little photoshop needed for this, cropped, sharpened, equalised, and lightened photo.

Same Image four colour schemes

Next Step

Step 3

One Step Beyond



or perhaps The Twilight Zone

A dancing swan...

Lovely , all!
I have to remind you all not to post more than one photo a day.

Oops! I broke the forum:

You broke them, I cut them up.

That's looks really good flopsymopsy.

Inverted and converted to B/W in photoshop.

Telly/Flopsy: you two are too clever by far!

I was advised that this image would be better suited here. It is an image from the public domain, a Hubble Space Telescope image released by NASA/ESA. I just reversed the color attributes to make one item in the image stand out more than it does in the original form (For that image, see Wikipedia's entry for Hoag's Object at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hoag%27s_Object ).

My posting from the Photo-a-Day Thread:
There is a galaxy called Hoag's Object. It is a special type of galaxy called a Ring Galaxy. A couple of years ago, while a woman was helping to sort through the Hubble images for NASA/ESA, she noticed an unusual bit to Hoag's. At the one o'clock position, through the ring gap there is another Ring Galaxy! Only one in tens of thousands form a ring but to have two lined up with a view from Earth is "Astronomical" no pun intended. If you look up Hoag's and see the black space image, the second ring is too faint to see without the original image and a magnifying glass. My contribution was to reverse the color attributes and voila, the second ring is visible to all.

But as I have already mentioned The photos in this whole forum must be taken by the menber posting, not googled or obtained from other sites. Please remove any posts that are not yours and refrain from doing so in future.Thanks
Here are the rules
1. The greatest dimension (height or width) of a displayed photo should be no more than 640 pixels.

2. A link to a larger version of the displayed 640 pixel photo can be included in a post.

3. A link in to a second photo can be included in a post if it is related to the one displayed.

4. Post only one photo per day in the following threads:

* Photo-a-Day.
* Image Art.

5. Post only one photo per week in the 'themed' thread.

6. Photos displayed or linked to in 'Photo-a-Day' and 'Themes' must have been taken by yourself.7. People should not be the subjects of photos. Where it is not possible to keep people out of photos because buildings/places are never free of them, they should be kept in the background as much as possible (no recognisable features).

8. Post photos by adding to the current threads. No need to start a new one.

9. No photos posted in advance because of going away (avoids multiple photos in one post, or more than one photo a day being displayed in separate posts).

10. No 'off-site' smilies or other non-photo content. Use only smilies available in the forum's 'Instant Graemlins' list.

11. The rule about not displaying any images in posts still applies elsewhere in the FunTrivia Forums with the exception of the 'Craft Circle Photo Gallery'. Photos relevant to that subject can be posted there.

People have broken, cut, and crumpled Funtrivia--I took some badges and glued them onto a sphere.

Ooh that's very clever. Would you mind saying how you did that, Guru?

I wish everyone would tell us how they do these neat things. That used to be one of the 'rules' for this part of the forum, didn't it?

Yes, Liz, it did. In the days of the great TW. Please do tell us, as some of these are so very clever.

Here is a collaborative effort. I had posted an image of my bicycle generator configured as a pinwheel mount on the Pix-a-day thread. Guruoftrivia took it and exaggerated the contrast and rotated colors coming up with an image he thought reminded him of a futuristic soldier holding a weapon of some sort. I then painted some more onto it to enhance the man image and make it more of a hat tipping idea drew a flying saucer shooting a ray beam and with motion lines for effect.
Anyway, I present a mixing of skills (mehaul/guru/mehaul):

Brilliant Image Mehaul and Guru.

I love what you've both done with this, very, very creative :-)

You're right Liz I should say what programs are used at least. It's a way for people to know what the programs are capable of doing.

All of mine are done either in Xara Xtreme, CorelDraw or Corel PhotoPaint. The broken forum is done in Xara Xtreme and the crumpled one in PhotoPaint. These programs have the tools to do such things.

The pictures aren't difficult to produce if you have the programs and have been using them for a while. An explanation of the steps may not mean too much without the reader also having the programs. I don't think many people do. I can only say it is just some trickery the programs are capable of and me having a little practice with using them.

I think the cut up forum and the sphere are great. I have no idea how they were done.

Why Trev, Thank you kindly.

TW, thanks for the explanation. That's all I need, is to know what programs make these fun images possible, with just a bit of a "how I did it"

Mehaul, great image, but just a little bit scary!

I use Photoshop. It has a feature called 'actions' which are a bit like mini-programs that you can build yourself or download. I often put frames on my photos for example and created an action that resizes the image, puts a single pixel line round the image in a dark colour, then puts a bigger light colour edge round the whole thing. If I'm doing that on a set of, say, 12 images going through those processes can be time-consuming. Basically I add the effects I want on one image and record the steps as I go along then all I have to do on the other 11 images is click on a button and Photoshop will do everything for me. You can also use actions to adjust images, add lighting effects, vignettes, tints, etc.

The action I used to cut up that image is based on one I downloaded. I have changed it a bit to put some movement in the final image so that it looks as though a breeze had ruffled the pieces. I think that looks more natural than a simple grid.

I hope this makes sense!

That makes lots of sense, and inspires me to investigate what I might be able to do with Photoshop! Thanks!

I have Adobe Photoshop, but rarely use it, because I don't enjoy all the "layering" aspects and it's really not that easy for a beginner to learn. Plus it takes up too much RAM on my (very old) computer. It's a VERY powerful program in the hands of a willing and able participant though!

I also use Jasc Paint Shop Pro, Roxio Photo Suite and have three or four video editing programs. But for simple resizing, or lightening a photo that is too dark, I almost always use ACDSee. It's quick, easy to use and isn't a mem hog.

Personally, I believe that "fixing" a photo by "pumping up" a certain hue/saturation, or anything else the camera didn't do on its own is more "image art" than "photography". I admit that I grew up with a Pentax SLR, with REAL FILM and multiple lenses and filters, so perhaps I'm showing my age and need to "move on with the times" lol.

I have downloaded a few freebies over time that do specialised things (like text shadows and 3d capabilities as they were necessary for the dozen or so websites I've built for folks), and this program is one of them ... it's called (gasp) "Shape Collage". There's a "free" version and a "pro" version. The pro version you have to pay for, so naturally it does things the free version doesn't do, but the freebie is still kind of fun anyway. Here's my offering for February 14th : )