Somehow – I don’t know how – the ability for you to leave comments got turned off on some recent posts. I only noticed it this morning.

Heaven forbid that you should be prevented from participating.

This is what I felt like when I noticed it*:

It’s fixed now, but my face seems to be frozen permanently in this grotesque mask of anger.

Actually, a couple of people have mentioned that it’s a marked improvement.

Ta.

*Try the Photoshop Liquefy filter. It’s a tonne of fun.

This morning Selene was doing her silly daytime tricks just as the sun was coming up. I’m usually so focused on other images that I forget to look for her.

Here’s Selene peeking out from behind some coconut fronds:

A little different angle and some more telephoto boost gives us this. It’s a good one to click to enlarge:

I’m never one to ignore a sunrise, so here’s Yet Another Gorgeous Emotive Madang Eastern Sunrise (I’m going to start using the acronymic version of that – YAGEMES [pronounced yah-GEE-meez]):

Hey, it’s not any sillier than most acronyms. The above was a three-shot panorama blended by Photoshop.

Here’s a single frame showing how the many colour controls available can generate a completely different rendition of the same scene:

Some of you are already fans of Photoshop, so I won’t waste time singing its praises. For those of you who are not familiar with the Adobe photographic tools, I’ll show you two screen shots of the ones that I use the most.

Here is a screenshot of Adobe Bridge with the shots from today open on the “filmstrip” at the bottom. You can see one of the frames enlarged so that I can judge if it is something worth of further work:

For the technician/artists out there, I’ll mention that Bridge does an excellent job with RAW files from just about any camera and opens a RAW image directly into the Photoshop Camera Raw filter so that you can make any conceivable adjustment that you might desire. (If that’s gobbledygook to you:  RAW files capture the information for each colour and keep the colour channels separate from each other, giving a huge range of possibilities to the artist. It’s the One Big Secret for creating good underwater shots.)

Here is the frame from the filmstrip opened in Photoshop:

The fun of fooling around with Photoshop can suck up an inordinate amount of time. I have had to exert the miniscule force of my pathetic self-discipline in order to keep myself down to an hour or so a day.

It beats watching reruns of The Simpsons.