Fun with Photoshop

Once again, I've signed up to do a presentation at the Convention...lots of pretty pictures. Two problems:

1 - No More PowerPoint. I've paid for just about every version of Keynote, but have never really used it. I loathe PowerPoint more than just about any other piece of software. So, I've set up my presentation in Keynote - there was a bit of a learning curve, but nothing insurmountable. As long as I remember to keep it simple, everything should work just fine. Or so I hope.

2 - Using Scanned Pictures. For reasons not really worth going into, I am using either old digital pictures of pieces I no longer own (and when I mean old, I mean OLD - stuff taken with my first digicam, a Kodak Digital Science 65, circa 1997) and edited with ColorIt! Given that the projector is fairly low res, I am not worried about the quality of the images (but I'll be certain to test them out). However, the majority of my pictures have been scanned from books, with unlovely screening effects and nasty shadowed backgrounds. I've been spending much, if not all of my free time extracting the piece from the background.

What I've achieved from this extremely tedious process is a new mastery of Photoshop's selection tools. Combining the wand with Quickmask with the Convert to Path with Edit Path with Convert to Selection, touching up with Quickmask again, and then back to Path for more tweeking, then back to selection, then inverting and finally - hitting the delete key and then...

Undoing, undoing, undoing, then Refining Edges, then re-inverting selection and deleting, and finally...

Saving and closing. And then trying to figure out what slide this piece needs to go onto. At the rate I'm going, with the number of pieces I want to show, I'll be at this until next year's Convention.