Kookaburra Narrawallee Ulladulla NSW Australia 19-03-2006

Took this photo at my pal's house at Narrawallee. Great place, great bird.

I am adding it to this blog purely as an experiment and to gain experience of making a blog entry direct from Picasa Web Album.

Next I want to see if I can get Blog update to appear on Facebook automatically.

Picasa - How to use Graduated Tint to darken one side of photo.

Howto use Graduated Tint to darken one side of photo.

1. Rotate photo so side you want to darken is on top.
2. Use Graduated Tint adjusting three controls
   
   - Amount using default black colour.
   - Feather to blend in shading.
   - Position by moving small cross to where you want the darkening to reach
   
   to achieve desired effect.
3. Save before rotating to original position otherwise darkening will revert to top.
   Note by saving a copy of original photo is made before all edits are written to image.

See example annotated Youtube slideshow below.

Flickr - Sort Sets Alphabetical

I currently have 50 Flickr Sets, and wanted to sort them alphabetically. However there appears to be no function to do this. You can sort photos within a set but not the sets themselves on the Flickr page.

Sets within a Collection can be manually sorted, so I created a collection called ALL and have manually sorted these sets alphabetically. Took about 5 minutes but should be a one off exercise. Next time I create a set all I need do is add it to ALL collection abd move it to the relevant position.

To create this Collection and organize alphabetically go to the Flickr Organize screen and select "Collections and Sets" Tab, create new Collection and drag and drop the Sets into it making sure you drop them alphabetically. I did this by taking each Set in sequence as shown by default on the display, and as I dragged it into the column on the left under the ALL Collection I made sure I dropped it in the correct place alphabetically. If you miss you can position your mouse over it in the left column and drag it to correct place.

Adding or editing Flickr blogger link solved.

Flickr now has the ability to post directly to several Blogger applications. This is quite simple to set up, it is the last option under the share button.

However I struggled to find out how to change ny template or add further blogs once I had created my first.

If you want to do this then you need to go to following link.

http://www.flickr.com/blogs.gne

Picasa - How to reduce brightness

There is no general brilliance control provided in Picasa. You can increase highlights and/or add fill-in light to increase brilliance, You can also make the dark areas darker by adjusting the shadow slider, but this does not effect the bright and mid tones.

However you can achieve overall darkening by using the graduated filter. This is generally used to decrease the brightness of the sky and enhance blue colour or cloud definition. In this effect you set where the graduation is to end which is indicated by a cross which is set at the centre of the photo, the amount of shade and feathering.

If you drag down the cross to the bottom of the photo and set the feather to 0, then the whole image is darkened uniformly and the amount can be controlled by the shade slider.

You can also change the colour of the shade, but being colour blind I keep away from this feature.

Photoshop Elements 6 - Camera RAW Profile

The RAW processing in my PSE did not have any camera profile.

I discovered that as well as replacing Camera Raw.8bi you need to execute the program CameraProfiles.exe Both these are downloaded from Adobe, and I used the ZIP for PSE v6 file found at http://www.adobe.com/support/downloads/thankyou.jsp?ftpID=4582&fileID=4238

Note Camera_RAW_5_5.zip is the latest version supported on PSE 6. Itried v5.6 and 5.7 and confirmed these did not work

Nikon D90 First Thoughts

At the recent Focus of Imaging I upgraded my Nikon D80 to a D90. I chose the FoI as deals were available and I purchased D90 with Sigma 18-55 f2.8-4 AF OS lens. I sold lens on eBay immediately and offset some of the cost.

The first thing I noticed was how good images were at higher ISO settings, even up to 1600 ASA. Other things I noticed quickly were

Faster continuous shutter operation.
Easier menus.
Brilliant screen.