I've been messin' around with Broderbund's PrintMaster Platinum program for many years. In fact, my first version of it was loaded on a computer with two different sized floppy drives! It's great for workin' up many different kinds of projects and for some operations I prefer it over Photoshop. Not only that but it comes with a gazillion free images in their clip-art library (Photoshop gives you what? a couple of dozen and then brags about it). That being said, both programs bring features to the editing table that allow a person to have a lot of fun goofin' around with photos.
It was because of PrintMaster Platinum that I was able to save a lot of my photos prior to the hard drive debacle last year. You see, Microsoft came out with this travesty called Windows 8.0. Bad enough, but then when they released v8.1, PrintMaster wouldn't work any more - it wasn't compatible with Windows 8.1! Soooo I bought a refurbished laptop pre-loaded with Windows 7 so I could use PrintMaster. Then I transferred a whole bunch of files to the laptop for working on at my leisure....
...then we lost the external hard drive in Dec 2015 and I've been scrambling to recover photos ever since. Okay, that's a whole lot of machinations to go through just to play around with photos but when you have a hobby ya-do-what-ya-gotta-do (within reason) to carry on. Last week I decided to go to the Broderbund website to see if PrintMaster was compatible with Windows 10 and guess what? YUP, it was! Yeah!! To make a long story longer, I got the latest version in the mail this week and promptly began playing. :-)
The latest version has a new look to its screens but it does the job well. I haven't had time to play with all the features but started with the pics you see below, a series I'm calling 'New Worlds' using various .PNG files I've created over the years along with photos taken by Bettina.
The images were created by squeezing, stretching, squishing, and layering several .PNG files over backgrounds taken from Bettina's voluminous amount of sky photos (with the exception of the last image which was a space wallpaper from, I believe, Space.com). I've posted the .PNG files here for your pleasure in creating your own projects.
The original is a scan from an old Quaker Oats cereal premium featuring space themes
This is a photo of my last space diorama project
A Builders Science Rocky Jones Space Ranger space ship
flame graphic culled from the Internet
Once all the images were layered-up the way I wanted, I still had to do a little cropping, a bit of contrast/brightness adjustment, and even a little bit of Photoshopping to clean up some little boo-boos.
Here are are the images in my 'New Worlds' series. Let us know what you think. Hope ya - Enjoy! Opa Fritz and Oma Bettina
I like the sky best on the second one. But, of course, the rocket 'pops' best on the star background one. :)
ReplyDeleteAric, You're right on the rocket 'popping' best on darker backgrounds. In truth I was hoping for a different result with the sky background but it's still kinda nice. I'll have to see what some of my other spaceships would like like against that background.
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