Directly Painting on a Tablet

I figured a good challenge for today would be to directly paint on my HP Spectre in Tablet mode using the HP pen. The Sun was coming out but there were a few fluffy cloud around and I figured they would be a great subject. So I fired up Corel painter and set up a coloured canvas with a rough paper texture. I then experimented with the pastel “brushes” and a directional blender.

Obstacle one was the high reflection (glare) off the screen even in the shade of an umbrella. Similar to tring to sketch directly onto my phone. Just had to preserve with this one, sunglasses didn’t help, they probably hindered.

Concern two was out in the sun the colour wheel tool doesn’t seem to give me and even range of colours. The deep blues all looked purple and the cyan decidedly green. I switched to the mixing tool but still found the blue of the sky difficult to judge. The screen blue was intense but the sky was more so. I can see a lot of practise will be required on matching colour if I want to continue plein-air tablet work.

After a small siesta and a G&T I retuned to do another, this time more clouds around and I took a wider view and a lot more blending.. I did the colour matching from the shade and seemed to get more natural colours

PhotoProject :: Recursive Self-Reference

It is close to a decade since I last attempted the one image three cameras trick, this time I wasn’t looking to create a screen wallpapers just a creative way to build some self-reference into an image about the changes in camera technology. Yesterday’s daily photo was a camera taking a set of selfportraits of itself as seen in the screen of my new tablet. A kind of spiraling droste effect of recursion, as much about composition as the cameras (the picture duplication devices) or use of layers in the post processing (the technique).

 

I decided this photo needed to be reproduced through the eyes of other cameras, a self-referencing recursion,  a photographic quine, where each generation reflect the previous within its own bounds, a self coping replicant project. All you need is a camera that can display the photo it just took, and another camera to take its photo … … …

 

And so on, till I reached today’s daily photo.

For a change there is more detail on the cameras used back in  my flickrstream

Hello from my new photographic travel mate

After the frustration of travelling with the upgraded laptop, that was having trouble connecting to wifi, amongst other frustrations. I felt it was time to get a much lighter but still powerful enough PC to use specifically for my photographic endeavors as I travel. The basics were pretty simple to map out, I wanted a browser, email, something run to Lightroom and OnOne 10 and Aftershot Pro. That would require 8GB as the minimum workable memory, an SSD drive if possible at least 256GB, a decent screen and light weight. Whilst there are lots of laptops that fit the bill I was attracted to just 3. The Microsoft Surface 4 Pro, the HP Spectre and the Apple MacBook Pro, Whilst the Apple with retina had the nicest screen it was by far the most expensive and I would have to restock my software tools and I’m not a fan of apple OS anyway.  Relearning the way I work while I travelled was really not an option. The decision between the Surface Pro and the Spectre was more difficult. They are both 2 in 1 machines that can run as a Windows 10 PC but also be run in tablet mode and have touch screens. It ended up just being the spectre is a sexy build, very James Bond, metal case and much nicer keyboard and the backlight IPS screen has a lower resolution than the surface but looked better with my photos (I spent some time on each computer looking at my recent daily photos on flickr, then stress tested the wifi access and checked out their keyboard. Not exactly a detailed technical investigation). So all three would be fine but the spectre looks more durable & stylish, something I could confidently lug around and still get down to serious photographic post processing and management. I'm not used to touch screens (yet) but the spectre comes with a pen that works a lot like the pen stylus on a wacom tablet, so that feels natural and powerful for me. Keyboard and pen are extra costs on the surface putting it significantly higher in price for a comparable setup. At 1.4 kg with the power block its less than a fifth the weight of my toshiba laptop and power brick (7.5kg). Travel fun awaits...

The Anatomy of The Corel Printer Lite’s Workspace

I intend to write a little about the computer workspaces (what’s on the screen) that I use and how I use the tools provided (the way the software works). Too follow up on an earlier post about workspace not workflow, and some extra inspiration from Beyond Digital Photography. Rather than describing how to use each software package, I just want to show what’s there and where various tools can be found. I am not sure why I am beginning with the Corel Painter Lite workspace, it is not strictly a photo processing program but was included as a bonus with Corel’s Aftershot Pro. It is often available in such good deals, alternatively it is available as a 30 day trial.  It is now in my tool kit because its a really nice little program that lets you paint in a very natural way and it also allows you to work on photos. It is also a wonderful place to learn about brushes, colour mixing tools and layers.

Like almost all windows programs there is a Menu Bar along the top of the screen, this is set of pull down menus that can access all features of the program but I must admit I very seldom use the menus. In the centre of the screen is the work area onto which you load “documents”, which can be photos or blank sheets of paper or canvas. You can have a series of these documents open on your work area at anytime but you can only work on the top one. On the right hand side is the toolbox, which has paint brush, eye dropper to pick colour, bucket fill, eraser, selection and cropping fames, cloning dodge & burn tools. There are also controls for zooming and panning, paper surface and background colour. There is an amazing range of natural media bushes and brush categories, selected with the brush selector in the upper right. Without doubt the brushes work best with a decent quality tablet (such as a wacom tablet, I have both a bamboo for the laptops and Intuit for my desktop) so that the brushes can respond to sensitive gesture hand movement and pressure.The brush properties are shown in a context sensitive property bar on the left hand side, and can be easily customised on the go. In  the upper centre you can choose to display the recent brush list to help if you want to swap back and forth with the same brushes/tools.

On the right hand side is the default location for a number of palettes which you can chose to display. I like the navigator which give you a thumbnail and key data about your current image. The Layer Palette has been detached in my example, and all palette can be detached as floating dialogue boxes. This palette allows you to add one or more transparent layers that float above image or blank sheet (the canvas). Anything you paint on the upper layers covers up what is below, although you can also control the opacity of this entire layer. The Mixer Palette is a marvel, it has three tabs, Colour, Mixer and Colour Set Library (which is a matrix of standard colours, but not an exhaustive selection). The Colour Tab, shows a fairly typical colour wheel and is called the colour Hue Ring. Inside this is an Saturation/Value Triangle. To select a colour, dial up the hue in the outer ring and then the move crosshairs in the triangle towards the right, for full colour saturation, or upper left paler, as in adding white, or lower right to darken the tone. The sliders below the Hue Ring show the RGB values for the selected colour. Alternatively you can set the colour you want with these sliders. The second tab the Mixer work much in the same way an artists would mix colours on his palette. The brush icon lets you mix colours, the eye dropper lets you sample the colours as mixed on your brush in the main work area.

  

As an example of how I might use Corel Painter Lite’s capabilities, I have loaded a photo of some fish oil tablets shaped roughly into a fish shape as my canvas. I scrapped a few extra white lines into this photo to help emphasise an eye, mouth and fins, before I add a second layer and painted over it in greens and blues, rather than the originally over-powering mustard background, and a little red and dark blue emphasis on the fish. All easy steps once you are familiar with the workspace.