Tessra's Art Thread

[Tessra]

At the risk of sounding disloyal to my computer... i was fairly good on my PC with Photofiltre... but I can't seem to find a good program that I like for my Mac. 

I'm glad you girls like her  

[Candy]

You don't like GIMP?

[Aramara Meibi]

GIMP is alright, it takes some getting used to.

[LigH]

Or do it online in the Pixlr Editor (requires Flash).

[Dannae]

Nice portrayal of Mari, Tess!

Here are 2 ways to rotate your pic. that come with Macs:
If you used a scanner, there's an option for rotation angle if you use ImageCapture.
If you already have a digital picture like from your cell that needs rotating, open with Preview and under tools heading choose rotate right or left.

Maybe you already know that and were just trying to get photobucket to do it instead.

If you ever want to play with digital painting with lifelike materials like watercolors, I highly recommend an inexpensive wacom pen tablet to start with and a program like ArtRage Studio, $30, has a free demo too, or the older ArtRage for $20 and made to be easily used with a pen tablet. I've seen wacom graphire tablets on ebay for around $40 and they work well or the newer bamboo and intuos ones are nice if you can spend more.

[Tessra]

I have it rotated on my computer, but for some reason, photobucket kept un-rotating it.  I have no idea what was screwing it up last night, but no matter what i did, it would NOT register the rotated image, nor would it let me edit it on photobucket directly.  it was weird. i've never had that kind of trouble before.

[Aramara Meibi]

if you edit a picture on a mac using iPhoto, it saves the edited version under a different directory, always keeping the original intact and safely tucked away. Maybe you uploaded the original version?

other than that, i can't help you with the photobucket side of things. I use picasa for my image hosting.

[Caraick]

I've always had difficulties doing anything but very basic edits with iPhoto. If you plan on doing anything, get Photoshop and Illustrator. 

[Gilrond]

By the way, Gimp editor will release single mode version very soon, which really should make it easier to use:

http://tasktaste.com/projects/Enselic/gimp-2-8
http://arstechnica.com/open-source/reviews/2010/02/hands-on-new-single-window-mode-makes-gimp-less-gimpy.ars

[LigH]

There are some tools which "losslessly rotate" a JPEG only logically, by storing EXIF data into the header, without actually reordering the image content. Web browsers will probably ignore that flag.

[weltall]

that's what happens when dumbing down an application interface in the pov that the application knows better than you...

[Aramara Meibi]

I've always had difficulties doing anything but very basic edits with iPhoto. If you plan on doing anything, get Photoshop and Illustrator. 

there are major differences between a photo editor, photo manipulator, and a graphics program. I like iPhoto for doing simple things like adjusting contrast and color balance, cropping, rotating, etc. because it's simple to open and run on my mac. it's also a great tool for organizing photos.

illustrator, being a vector based program is great for creating graphics, such as my sig below, but for editing photographs (which are pixel based) it is not.

photoshop has features of all three types of software, I primarily use it if i'm in the mood for doing digital collages or heavy manipulation. also, i learned photography back in the good ol' days of kodachrome and darkrooms, and i like to treat photoshop as a digital darkroom of sorts.

then again, why am i telling you all this when i should be saying:

lovely portrait of mariana, tesh, regardless of how sideways it is.

[Caraick]

Your sense of humor is, as always, quite endearing Ara 

[Mariana Xiechai]

I has a (kinda) related question. I want to upload that as my picture for the myplane whatever, but I dunno how I shrink it appropriately. <.< >.>

[LigH]

You can use any image editor (or viewer with at least basic editing features) to resize an image to a given maximum of width or height. And with a web optimizing compression you can even make it "as good as it gets, but less than X KB". One possible free software for Windows would be IrfanView with its RIOT plugin (Save for the web; Compress to size); XnView has some similar feature (at least you can move the quality slider up to the size threshold). It is recommendable to use the "Progressive" format for JPEGs, if available.