Nifty....

So Felbie and I have been playing around with the idea of upgrading to the new Adobe creative suite... mainly so I can get Photoshop CS4.... we downloaded the trial version and I have been playing with it... all the new features are great!

One of my favorite artists is David Hockney... I especially enjoy his photo montages like these...
His mother...


I have tried to emulate this style occasionally and I have many photos that were taken but few were assembled... working with this many layers on my old computer was really slow... so the photos just sat... Hockney did all this by hand! But this is the digital age soooo ....

...all of a sudden they have made Photoshop smart enough to assemble multiple photos for me!!! And I have a computer that is fast enough to handle it! .... However... I think something is lost in the seamless perfection of the way in which Photoshop works it's magic...

It's the court house in Lockhart, TX. Best town to get BBQ brisket!!!

This image was made from 23 photos that Photoshop seamlessly pasted together for me... simple... but I prefer the look of the seams and distortions you get by assembling individual photographs by hand. That is what makes the montage interesting... without that you just have a photograph with a funny border... right?

I will have to play with this more and see what I can do with it... It would be amusing however if Photoshop developed a way to stack your images Hockney style... :)

Ok... so that being said... now I am going through some of my photos and putting them together...

You really should click on this one to see in larger... this is Barton Springs... also in TX.... Austin, TX... this is where I hung out almost every day when we were there this summer. The water is always a perfect 68 degrees.

Here is another version of the springs...this time instead of selecting auto and blend.. I deselected blend photos and selected college mode...

This time I told it not the "blend" the photos....
And now here is the difference between assembling a "college" by hand (in photoshop) vs. letting the computer do it in collage mode with no blending....

The first picture below is an image I just made of some old photographs attached to an old grad school project. In this new image I allowed the computer to patch my images together... there were a few images it didn't know what to do with and so it left them off to one side... I cropped those out of the image for comparison sake...

And this second image is the one that I assembled by hand (in Photoshop), back in 2003 while in school. This is one of my Hockney emulations.

The photos that the computer did not include in the above image are a few of the closet images to the far left and a few of the photos of the art on my wall to the far right in this image...they were taken from a different vantage point. It is interesting that photoshop can recognize this... or rather that it is confused by this.