Week 1

PiCo Pro Revisited

This week I explored PiCo in depth. While we touched on some of its features in FF1, this week I got to use some of the really powerful features. I was able to enable and disable a variety of file formats including PSP tubes. This is wonderful!

I've collected and made tons of tubes. However, PSP7 is really slow loading them if there are more than a few in the Tubes folder. I had already created lots of other Tube folders, classifying them by subject or type. Now I can load just a few tubes at a time, but have the others available just a few keystrokes away in PiCo. Thanks, Harald, for implementing this.

Fantastic Machines Paint Engine

This is a great freeware filter. Unlike most freeware, it is very full featured and allows you to save your own presets. What does it do? Well, it gives you the ability to make graphics look like they've been painted in a variety of ways: oils, pastels, sponge, etc.

	This is the original - a colorful photograph. While it's nice enough, it's not really spectacular. With a few key strokes in Paint Engine, it can become something really nice.
	Here I've used my own preset based on: Push Intensity 0.1, Lighten .3, Bias 0. Pull Intensity 1.12, Lighten .3, Bias 0 Intensity 2, Input checked, length 19, Radiate 1.47, Motion Angle 40, Curl 110, Oper. Angle 0, Curl 0, R. I think this looks very much like an oil painting - something I never was able to master outside the digital world. While it's not as pretty as the next 2, it does show how much you can vary the looks of your graphic.
	This is the Poster 4 preset. This really gives some nice color depth.
	Here's my favorite - a variation I did on the Sparks preset. The brush strokes look a lot like leaves, which is a good effect for the trees. I also like the speckling it does to the sky.

PiCo Pro Batch Processing

Back to PiCo to do lots of effects at the same time. Like everyone else I ran into a few problems and couldn't get my effects added to my images. I'm using the graphics from above here and in the exact same order. I had saved them using the .jpg standard, so that wasn't my problem. I finally figured out that by closing both PSP and PiCo and then reopening them, I was able to batch process them.

What I've done is:
resize them;
rename them with a _tn2 (handy for adding a thumb nail image to a web page)
added a filter - Horizontal Mirror
added another filter - Automatic Contrast

And...ta da.. I did all the changes to all 4 images at the same time.

Filter Frenzy 2 - a class from LVSOnline.com

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