Comparing Photo Tools

Photojojo has once again lead me to a neat tool- a website that, in their words, “oldifies” photos. Check the Photojojo entry on how to use the site (as the site itself is in Japanese).

Upon seeing this site, my first thought was, couldn’t I do the same thing in a photoshop program myself?  Here’s some results to compare from different programs.

The original photo:

The photo edited in the Japanese site:

The photo edited in Adobe Photoshop Express:

I played around with the black and white settings first, then added a sepia tone, softened it, and changed one of the brightness settings, I think.

 The photo edited in Corel Photo House

For some unknown reason, the ancient version of Corel I have doesn’t automatically do sepia, so it was a bit of a process to do (it involved turning it black and white, then playing around with the replace colours function).  I fiddled with the brightness and contrast, as well as the simplify colours feature, and then tried to add some faded, watermarked spots using a large, transparent white brush.

So what do you think? Which one’s the “oldifiedest”?  Any other recommendations for oldifying?  Does anyone know what kind of filter could be used to add scratch marks in Corel?

 

Having a Photoshop Freakout, Must Share

When I read it, I nearly burst with excitement.  I’m sure some squealing noises followed.  On the most recent post by Photojojo, a blog I’ve mentioned frequenting before, there was an announcement saying that Adobe has released an on-line express Photoshop!

Now, don’t go into this expecting all of the advanced Photoshop features; the full version of Adobe Photoshop is far too expensive to be giving out on-line (Although, as I’ve mentioned before, I use an ancient version of Corel Photo House that has a bunch of similar, but less user-friendly features to Adobe.  I’ve gotten away with using Corel for some on-line Adobe photo tutorials quite nicely, if I do say so myself).  However, if you’re currently clogging your computer’s hard drive with one (or several) of those uber-confusing, trashy photo-editing suites that comes with your camera, you should consider unloading it, and doing your basic photo touch-ups on-line.  It’s so slick, and everything is well laid out, so that you can actually find the tools you want to use!

This site has the potential to develop into the next Flickr.  It’s also meant to be a photo sharing site, with 2 GB of storage per account.  I haven’t played with all of the features yet, but I know that currently, you can send images in emails, create links to them, or embed them in blogs.  It doesn’t have all of the photo networking features that Flickr has, but if you give it time, I bet these features will appear.

Now enough talk, it’s time to see some examples!  These are just some quick examples of features you will find on Adobe Photoshop Express.  I am aware that some of these may be a little over-the-top, but I’m just having fun.