One Plus One Equals One - this Time
I few months ago I decided that I no longer wanted to pay for a yearly subscription to Adobe's Creative Cloud, which includes Lightroom and Photoshop. I have been using On1 software for post processing my images for several years. This software has continued to get better and better, to the point that I knew I definitely did not need Lightroom for any reason, and, for most other specialty finishing On1 was working well for that, too. In fact, none of my layered and composited images for my music video were created in Photoshop. I love the challenge of creating something new with a combination of images and have decided that I want to try my hand at some photo artistry composites, images that are imaginative and even on the "artsy" side. Photoshop does have better tools for that, but, as it turns out so does Affinity Photo, which my photography mentor, Trace Aiken, has been using for years. You pay once for Affinity, and it is yours forever and with free updates, too. And, luckily, thanks to the pandemic, the price was slashed in half for a while recently. Now I am in the process of learning how to use this software. I have spent a good bit of time in the last week just learning the Affinity basics, and now I have started the deep dive into it to create something entirely new and different from the pieces of one or more other images. There are a lot of video tutorials on-line and I own some Photoshop based courses on these techniques, but I feel a bit like the beginning art student who has been shown into a studio full of different kinds of paints, brushes, and canvases and not sure where to start. It's almost overwhelming. I remind myself that I did not have a clue about how to make a music video either when I started that project. So I am not going to allow myself to be daunted this time either. With the help of a tutorial yesterday afternoon I took the two images, spliced together above for you to see, and created one new one. It's no work of art, but it is a start, and I am looking forward to the challenge that I have given myself. I am sure you will be seeing more of my progress from time to time. Here's yesterday's creation.
