Back To The Old Grind

Good Morning, Gentle Readers!

Today's image is titled Future Gazing. I thought it appropriate for the kind of focused-lens effect I managed to get here, though I didn't get the flames as I wanted them. Still, I did get sparks where I didn't really expect them, and that makes up for it.

I was presented with an interesting challenge last night. A friend found a coat of arms for her husband's family but the lines were too blurred to really be presentable, and the text was worse. She couldn't do anything with it in Basic Paint, so she asked me to see what I could do, since I do toy with Paint Shop Pro. Ideally, she would have talked with someone with access to a program like Photoshop, but neither of us know anyone like that. One thing I did that seemed to help was use the sharpen and enhance tools. However, when I tried just one too many applications of that, the image started looking like a soap-bubble rainbow- so I had to back up just a hair.

The sharpening and enhancing didn't help with the text at all. Worse still, when I tried to erase it, I found a bright blue background behind the surface that didn't belong in the image at all! Again, I had to back up. I then tried using the dropper to pick up the color I did want, and used that as a kind of digital white-out. That was much more effective, and I was able to re-create the text far more legibly.

In the middle of that, I was looking at one of my end-of-term projects, and found I could use work I had done in a previous assignment to help with it. Of course, the first thing I did was look for the document in question. Oops! It wasn't where it should be, though I could have sworn I had done it! I laughed when I realized what had happened; I had indeed done the assignment while on vacation, so the document I want was on my flash drive rather than my main computer. What a relief! What's even better is that the assignment took care of the item that I would have had trouble with in the project.

Well, folks- It's back to the old grind for another week.

Until We Meet, Gentle Readers...