Photoshop advice

[Bill Murray]

Let me start this thread by saying that since joining this forum, I have been very impressed by the caliber of not only the members but also your contributions, your knowledge and your dedication to collecting and presenting here the best you lhave to offer.

In that sense, like many of you, I "belong" to perhaps 150 other forums dealing with all aspects of military history in order to advance my knowledge and my archive of all things relating to military transport vehicles of the period roughly 1930-1950.

Only in the last two years or so have I started to actively download pictures from the net and as well to share them here even though I have had my hobby interest since the mid 1960s. Until I came across this forum, I did not worry too much about the quality of the photos I sent or copied as I was just happy to get them and load them into my PC memory. And....I would say that this mind set is seen on most of the other forums I visit.

This forum is very different in that respect and I am now challenged to try to find a way to present here and on the other forums much better quality images. I have had a few exchanges of PMs with some of you but I thought it might be an idea to present my problem to the whole photo/document collecting group.

My present situation is sort of like this. I have thousands of images stored on my PC and many more times that number in hard copy photos of vehicles. Most are pretty good and usable as they are. Many hundreds, however are of rather poor quality or are images where the vehicle is a secondary object in the photo or perhaps I may have a photo of a large vehicle park and I wish to isolate and improve the image of one single vehicle.

On this PC, I now have four photo imaging programs. The supplied Gateway one, something called Picture Viewer, Adobe Photoshop 2.0 and a program that came with my Epson 4180 scanner

As far as I can determine, none of these can digitalize a photo and recreate it in an improved form. When I crop and resize a photo to isolate a particular vehicle, the image is essentially destroyed in the sense that it seems to "scatter" into a lot of little blocks and cannot be put back together again.
I would also like to be able to learn how to colorize a photo but that is another subject for another day.

So as not to write an even longer book here, I have done a lot of research the last two days and what I have come up with is that Adobe Photoshop CS2 seems to be the ultimate photo editing program currently on the market.

It is quite expensive, $600, but I can justify that price I think as I can use the program in my business, my daughter is a professional photographer and can use the program in her business and for the rest, I spend far too much money on my hobby just like the rest of you.

My questions are sort of like this. Is it worth the money to get a top of the line professional program as opposed to a normal hobbyist program? I have not been able to figure out if I can use the program on 3 different PCs without getting into licensing problems. Adobe is less than helpful in answering that question. All three are wireless networked but I do not know how to export it to the other two.

Hopefully the last question, I can download the program from Adobe directly to the PC I am using now. Takes a lot of time even with high speed broadband but it can be done. You can also get a CD with the tutorials for no extra cost. Or....should I order the "box" with all the download stuff on CDs?

Sorry for writing a book, but you guys have really inspired me to do a lot better job of organizing and improving my photos

Any and all input would be very much appreciated.
Bill

[Strider]

Adobe Photoshop is an amazing tool but like any tool it needs to be mastered. It's a tough programme to learn and use well. By the sound of it you want to cut out parts of a photo and clean up the background. So you are going to need to learn to use "paths" and "layer masks" to be successful with Photoshop. It will need a fairly large time commitment on your part.

You already have Photoshop v.2, how well did you get on with using it? That was the version I first used back around 1995. Many of the principles used in v.2 are still relevant to the latest version. The biggest change was the addition of multiple layers in v.3, which in my opinion has been the most important new development in Photoshop in its history. Still you should be able to achieve what you want to do with v.2.

My suggestion to you would be to really get to grips with Photoshop version 2 before deciding to purchase the latest all-singing, all-dancing version.

Lee
www.psywar.org

[Akira Takiguchi]

I guess Bill means Photoshop Elements 2...

[Daniel H.]

Photoshop is a great program and well worth the investment if you take the time to learn its functionality. Unless you are great at self-directed study, it might make sense to take the specially designed training courses. That increases the investment considerably, but the dividends are paid when you can do what you want with your photos. l'm still using version 6.0 which is several years old now, but still has more power than I can use. I've got the boxed version with manuals, something I rarely like or use, but with this program it is easier sometimes to have the books at hand.

-d.

[Strider]

I guess Bill means Photoshop Elements 2...

Ah yeah most probably... scrub what I said above.

[werner geier]

hi bill,
as much as i would recommend photoshop as THE essential pic processing tool, i also have to say: dont expect wonders. if an image is poor already, especially lo-res internet downloads, not much can be done to save them.
you can clean these pics superficially, but information that is not in the pic due to low resolution ("blocks" showing when cropped) cant be restored.
good luck, werner

[lolle]

I agree on Daniel H.´s coments about the photoshop.
I have had it for some years, and have also been sendt on training courses paid by my job. But if not used with regularity its its easy to forget the most advanced things, at least i have forget most...
I have had the same scanner as you mention, and scanned via the photoshop program. The scanning doesnt get better using photoshop, and you dont get any more functions using it.
The Epson program you have should be able to scan small parts of a photo.
If i have got it right thats one of your problems, so perhaps its just the way you try to scan it ?
I add a little scan, the original picture is 5 cm wide. The part scanned is 0,5 cm wide. Its a bad photo, not to sharp.You should be able to do the same to get details of your pictures.
About you digital pictures that "crack" when you try to increase it in size.
Its more or less nothing you can do.On a few occasions when a picture has been planed to use in a book and i have got a digital copy that was to small for the use, i have had to make a print of the picture, and then rescan it in the size pixels wanted by the publisher(allowed by the owner). Sometimes the result has been very good, sometimes not.
lolle
p.s. noticed that the picture "crack", ist due to me reduzing size and upload time.

[petermac]

Hello,

I would echo the comment about being limited by the quality of the original image. There is very little that you can do if the definition of the image you have is poor to start off with, no computer programme can make something out of nothing. This gets worse if you want to selectively crop part of a poor quality image.

I'm a professional photographer and have the full Photoshop installed on my computer but for most things I find that Photoshop Elements is quite sufficient (and it's MUCH easier to learn!!). You really need to be putting in 8 hour days 5 days a week in order to get the best out of professional programmes, not only to justify the cost of buying them but to keep yourself up to speed as there are just so many features.

One of the main problems with images off the web is that they are jpg'd over and over again with a loss of resolution each time they are sent or stored. If I think I'm going to have to do any 'housework' on a downloaded picture I always store it as a TIFF file and work from that. It takes up a lot of disc space as the file sizes are larger but memory is cheap nowadays.

Photoshop elements is often given away with scanners which makes them a bargain.

Peter

[Bill Murray]

My thanks to all of you for your generous and extremely informative replies.

After reading through the thread several times and playing around with the Version 2 that I have and also reading some of the tutorials provided with that version it became painfully obvious to me that this is no plug and play program and that my skill sets are nowhere near what they need to be to get the $600 complete program.
A couple of members offered to let me borrow their Version 7 to see if that works for me and I will try that and see how well I can make it work.

As a side note, in playing around with Version 2, I found some of it's operations were easier to perform in one or the other of the several photo editing programs I have that came with the PC or an accessory. I have tried moving the photo from one program to the other and it seems to work out in the end. Sure takes a long time though

Thanks to all of you again.
Cheers
Bill