Vibrance vs. Saturation

A June Sky, 8:50 P.M.

Some years ago, I took a Photoshop class and asked the teacher, “What is the difference between the Saturation Adjustment and the Vibrance Adjustment?” I forget her response, but I interpreted it as Vibrance increasing the contrast between colors. 

Most sources say that Vibrance enhances muted colors without overly saturating the colors that are already bright. If you increase Saturation instead, it deepens all colors, giving your picture an unnatural look if you’re not careful. 

Let’s experiment with my sky shot in the Photos app that came with my iPad. (I stopped using Photoshop when they started requiring a subscription because I don’t like recurring fees.) If I increase the Vibrance slider all the way to 100, the sky deepens and we see a pretty sunset.
 

If instead, I increase Saturation all the way to 100, the colors are brilliant, but the sky looks unnatural, especially the blue.

That looks awesome, but it’s not at all what I saw. I pulled the sliders back and then set Vibrance at 20 and Saturation at 10. The result is the first image, which is not as impressive, but it’s true to what I saw. After all, I was just walking the dog in the evening, and I wasn’t interested in waiting for the colors to possibly deepen to a stunning intensity.

Most of my pictures are fairly realistic. I’m not a big fan of overly manipulated images unless they are clearly art rather than journalistic. When I use AI or artistic filters, I’ll usually mention it. 

Most of my blog posts are journalistic in style, with the exception of the Saturday posts that I pretend are written by my dog. I like to think that everyone is “in” on that little joke. 

Bird Post #1316

This pretty goldfinch perched in my front yard. I was able to take its picture with my cell phone through the glass storm door.

The bird on the fence was in the county park where I was walking Charlie. It looked like a barn swallow to me, but the app on my phone identified this picture as a kingbird. There was a less sharp photo that it said is a swallow. AI is not very discerning.

The picture of swans is from 2005, the first year that I was blogging. Internet connections were slow then, so the picture is not high resolution, but I had used an artistic effect so I don't think it matters.

Not a Perfect Header Collage

At least It's Colorful.

This collage is an experiment. Maybe I will do it again with a better understanding of how to proceed.

I used digital images that I created using AI and combined them in PhotoCollage. I tried another app first, but it was not intuitive and I didn’t want to waste time trying to figure it out. Since I could not create the long image that I wanted, I combined two collages using Adobe Photoshop. 

My intent was to create a social media header that reflected my blogging interests. Out of curiosity, I asked Claude, an AI app, to list my top 10 interests based on my blog posts. It actually did a decent job. (I won’t get into why I think Artificial Intelligence is a misnomer, but I will say that its attempt to be ingratiating sounds insincere.)

So here is “Claude’s” analysis:

<<What a lovely blog! Based on the recent posts and post labels, here are your top ten interests as they come through in The View from Squirrel Ridge:

1. Birds — birdwatching, feeders, and identifying species like cardinals, finches, and sparrows comes up constantly 

 2. Dogs — Charlie is clearly a beloved companion and frequent star of the blog 

 3. Nature & Wildlife — squirrels, deer, cats, farm animals, and all kinds of critters 

 4. Gardens & Flowers — visiting gardens, photographing blooms, seasonal plants like Virginia bluebells and redbuds 

 5. Photography — the whole blog is built around daily photo-sharing 

 6. The Shenandoah Valley / Local Exploration — state parks, Woodstock, Strasburg, Winchester, and the surrounding area 

 7. Trees & Skies — a recurring subject in posts and photo linkups 

 8. Civil War History — you have a whole separate site (civilwarfieldtrips.com) and it appears as a post label 

 9. Arts & Crafts / Murals — street art, decorations, and creative sights you encounter on outings 

 10. AI / Technology — you have a separate AI image blog (Imagecroft) and tag posts with “Artificial Intel” 

It’s a beautifully consistent blog — clearly a daily practice you’ve kept up for many years!>>

I see that I left an important image out of the collages: a beagle! I did have one in the first attempt, the one I abandoned. I’ll just have to try again another day and put Charlie’s picture in it.

Oh, wait! I have some beagle pictures so…

Mosaic Monday

The Miller House on Cougill Road

 Middletown, VA

I put the name of the road in the title of the post because Miller House is a common place name, plus I have forgotten the name of the road several times when I was trying to find this historic site. It is mentioned in written accounts of the Battle of Cedar Creek (1864). This property is on the corner of Mineral Road and faces a railroad track.

The property was recently acquired by the Shenandoah Valley Battlefields Foundation, which will preserve it and possibly open it for tours. 

I’ve written about this place before (see the 2009 post about it). The ruins that are close to the road are sometimes referred to as a mill, but they are actually the ruins of a smaller house that was styled similar to the one that still stands. I photographed the smaller house in 1997, and it was still standing, but just barely. I suspect it predated the larger house, but I don’t know when they were built. 

I saw a photo of a lovely painting by artist John Chumley of the smaller house. I’ve seen an exhibit of Chumley’s work (see this post). He died in 1984.

I’ll spare you my rant about how the park service and others keep calling the ruins a mill when it was actually a brick house. Instead, allow me to complain about the update I just downloaded today on my iPad, OS 26.2. Things look different and I’m getting too stubborn to deal with changes all the time! The Photos app doesn’t have the parallax correction in the same way and I’m going to have to view a video to find out how to straighten lines. This probably doesn’t matter to most people, but I tend to take some photos a bit lopsided with my cell phone, partly because I’m trying to walk the dog and take a picture at the same time. So then I straighten them out on the iPad. I may have become picky when I was taking photo classes years ago, and we used medium format and leveled the camera with a bubble like a carpenter uses. It seems extreme now, but I learned a lot from that experience.

On the plus side, the Photos app now has a place to click to open the picture in “Extensions,” and one of them is SKRWT, which I downloaded some time ago. I can modify receding lines in that and then go right back to Photos. I like the ease of Apple’s Photos app, especially since I no longer subscribe to Photoshop. I don’t like paying for subscriptions. They add up, and my income doesn’t go up because I’m retired. Or maybe that’s an excuse and I’m just cheap!

La Tour Eiffel

A local photography group has the theme of “Cityscapes” this week. My first thought was, “I don’t have very many.” because most of my city pictures are limited in scope, such as showing a particular building or, people walking together. Then I remembered my European trips from decades ago. This picture is from Paris in the year 2000.

Back then, I was not using a digital camera. I did have the foresight to have my film scanned to disk or CD at the time of processing. I was already enjoying Photoshop or Photo Deluxe, which was an early predecessor to Photoshop Elements.

I guess I’m telling my age, but that’s okay. I have passed the point of being able to pretend that I’m young.

Twenty Years of Blogging!

My first blog post was on June 13, 2005. Even I am amazed that I've been blogging for 20 years.

Post #1

When I started, we were spending a lot of time in our Glebe Harbor home and the Internet connection was painfully slow. They didn’t have high-speed Internet in our corner of Westmoreland County so I had to use the phone line, and it was a very old phone line. I would actually click on a link, go to the kitchen and get coffee, and return to see that pictures on my screen were still opening. And pictures back then were much smaller because many people still had dial-up connections!

When I wanted to post a page with photos, I would compose it on my laptop and shrink the pictures to 3 x 5“ size (at 72 dpi), and drive to the library which was about 5 miles away. There I would connect to their DSL Internet and upload my text and pictures. I did not post every day until after we moved back to Bryce Resort and got a high-speed connection at home. 

I’ve selected a few pictures from my early months of blogging. There were other favorites that are too small to look good on today’s devices. 

Our view at Glebe Harbor

Even then I enhanced pictures in Photoshop.

Assateague Sunset

Marie

Sky, Trees, Mountain

The first scene is looking east toward the Massanutten Range. The second picture is looking west toward Great North Mountain. I took it while walking Charlie early this morning because I saw the hot air balloon.

These are cell phone pictures. I brightened the second one using Photoshop Express.

Nineteen Years of Blogging

Blog Post #8741

I began blogging on this day in 2005. That was a long time ago and it feels like it. Since then, I have moved four times and gotten divorced. I have also gotten a lot older.

When I started this blog, we were living in Glebe Harbor in a rambler facing a cove. I could watch birds from the deck, but that was the main thing the place had going for it. The internet connection was horrible because it was over an aging phone line, and pictures took forever to load. For that reason. I only posted occasionally and I shrunk my photos before posting them.  Often I composed a post offline and drove to the library to upload it. 

We were also a considerable distance from any real shopping. I had to drive over an hour to buy dog food because one of my dogs was allergic to chicken and the other was sensitive to grains. By the end of the summer, we were ready to move back to our smaller home in the mountains.

Some of the pictures I posted in 2005 were modified in Photo Deluxe, a predecessor to Photoshop Elements. Here are a few, small in size due to the slow speed in uploading and downloading pictures. 

Thank you to everyone who follows this blog and takes the time to comment. I love hearing from you.

Mild Winter, Signs of Spring

We haven't had much of a winter this year. Only one snowfall was enough to need shoveling, and I could have gotten away with not doing it except that I am obligated to keep the public portion of the sidewalk clear. We did get some bitterly-cold spells, but they did not last long. 

The news reported that "February, as well the previous two winter months, soared well past the internationally set threshold for long-term warming,"  This is worrisome. 

Still, I welcome the longer days and the early spring flowers. These daffodils are blooming next door.

I'm still seeing our year-round birds, and I've also seen some large flocks flying over which I assume are migrating. Here we see a mourning dove.

I had another picture that was similar and I edited it with a couple of filters. I used Photoshop Elements. I dropped my subscription to Photoshop because I don't like monthly payments. I liked it's functionality better though, partly because I knew so many shortcuts. 

Twixmas with Charlie

(Twixmas is the week between Christmas and New Year’s)

Hi, it's Charlie. I survived a holiday, which is a time when people invade my house and make noise. I won't complain because they brought some really good food, and even some toys for me wrapped in crinkly paper.

Uh oh! Mom did some things to my photo. I don't know why she bothers when I already look good!

Marie stayed for a few days and now I miss her. She rode with me in the backseat so that I didn’t feel so worried. She also bought me some things at Petco and played with me at the park.

Sometimes Mom and I go out on the deck and put out seeds for the birds and squirrels. I can watch them through the window. 

I heard that there is another holiday coming, but I hope it is a quiet one. 

Cardinals and Elements

Wild Bird Wednesday

The male Northern Cardinal is an eye-catching bird with his bright red feathers. I chose him as the subject for my first test of Photoshop Elements, a program that I have not used in years. I've been using Adobe Photoshop instead, a more advanced software which has many great features. 

At some point, I had to start paying a monthly subscription fee. I don’t remember when that was because I used Photoshop CS6 for a long time, but Adobe wanted everyone to pay the monthly fee, so when I got a new laptop several years ago, I was not able to install CS6. Rather than struggle with a non-supported software, I installed the subscription-based version of Photoshop. It seemed worthwhile because I used Photoshop almost every day.

Until I didn’t. I got an iPhone that took very good photos and found that I could simply crop them using my built-in photos app. I stopped using Photoshop every day, and eventually found I was only using it about once a week.

I hesitated and procrastinated about canceling my subscription but finally I did. I purchased Photoshop’s little cousin, Elements. It does not require a subscription, just a one-time payment that’s pretty reasonable. I tried it out today and found it does most of what Photoshop did, except  not as smoothly. It does have a long list of filters available. I hadn’t seen the “Comics” one in Photoshop  so I tried it here.

The vertical picture is one that I finished with a poster edge filter. I probably won’t use that a lot; I was experimenting.

Overall, I think Elements is going to be fine for my purposes.

Charlie’s Mid-April Update

Hi, it's me again. Don't worry, I am a friendly dog.

Do you like my new vest? It is more comfortable than the tactical harnesses that I tried. I was able to chew through their straps and Mom threw them away.

Marie came to see me this morning. She brought me a creamy treat in a cup. Yum! She took me for a walk and later went with us to the  dog park. There was a little girl who scared me a little by yelling “Puppy puppy!” She was friendly but loud.

Lynn came this afternoon. It’s a little confusing because they say they are sisters but they call my mom their mom. Does that mean they are my sisters? They don’t look like me at all.

Birds visit our yard. So far I have not gotten close enough to smell them. 

My kitty friend came back. We didn’t see it for several days and then it just appeared on the deck. I hope it will let me get close to it again. It only has three legs, so it walks differently than I do.

What's Your Superpower?

The September theme for City Daily Photo is 'My Superpower." I wondered what I should post for this. I used to think my superpower was patience, but as I grow older I have less time to be patient. Fortunately, I have another superpower. 

Sometimes I am invisible. Perhaps not literally, but as an ordinary-looking white woman, I often go unnoticed. 

Perhaps you looked at this picture of an automobile showroom and disn't see me. That's okay, it's an illustration, a Photoshop creation. Do you see me now?

 

Robin Framed and Filtered

 

Photo of the Year 2021

 But first, Happy New Year!

According to tradition and the City Daily Photo theme for this first day of the year, it is time to post a Photo of the Year for 2021. Since this year's activities were influenced again by a global pandemic, I'm going with a Covid-coping theme. So here I am at the vaccination site, looking a bit ragged from the stresses and limitations of the preceding months. 

Yes, I altered the photo a bit. For those who don't recognize the meme I added, that's Senator Bernie Sanders with the striped mittens. He was photographed that way at the inauguration of Joe Biden.

This is not the best photo I've posted this year but it is pertinent. The year was a tough one. We had the threat of a serious disease, an attempt at overthrowing the government, a series of natural disasters in various places that were probably caused by climate change, and other disturbing news stories. For a while it looked like the pandemic was being controlled but that shifted recently as a variant swept across the world. 

In spite of all the uncertainty, let's survive and continue to care for each other. Peace!