What do I have here?

[Hugo Borchardt]

Rich:

My wife is a pro photographer and has Photoshop CS on her Mac computer. I have the free opensource photo editor Gimpshop (gimpshop.com) on my Windows computer. Though the interface is a little different, I have found that I can do most anything I need to do with Gimpshop.

I also do a lot of photo editing on my iPad 2. Unlike Photoshop or Gimp, which allows you to do 1000 things, the iPad has a thousand free or very cheap (<$5) applications that do one thing really well, like combining images or removing power lines. Because of the touchscreen, you can do a lot of single editing tasks way faster than using a mouse.

Also, Adobe Photoshop Express is free for the iPad, and they have a new Photoshop Touch that I haven't tried yet.

To clip an image off a background and insert it into another pic, like I did with the crossed rifles, I just selected the chamber in the photo of the "Russian" and copied it to clipboard. Then I went to the Totenkopf Luger photo and pasted the contents of the clipboard into a New Layer. I selected the new layer, and used the eraser tool to erase the background around the crossed rifles, exposing the Totenkopf chamber below it. I had to zoom in and make the eraser very small to erase right around the edges of the rifles, and inside of them. It took about 10 minutes.

I learned from my wife to try and setup and take great photos that require no editing. Most of my photo editing is creating joke photos for friends or creating interface parts for computer programs.

Clark Rickman