(05-03-2025, 11:22 AM)Michigan Swamp Buck Wrote: Wow, Corel "Paint Shop". I remember that one, was that Windows 3.0?. Geeze Ninurta, you must be a DOS guy.
I have a lot of experience with early Photoshop, even had a few graphic design jobs where I got pretty good at making realistic-looking, completely artificial background rooms to place such cutouts into. I even incorporated tricks of perspective and hidden things as a personal signature for the commercial art I was creating. My bosses, even a senior designer, never caught on!
ETA: As good as I got, never used it too much to try and reveal details like you were. In fact, I find it a distraction when I see it used to enhance UFOs and monsters like Bigfoot.
The one I use is JASC ("Just Another Software Company") Paint Shop Pro. I started using it around version 7.04, and the last JASC version, before Corel bought it out and crippled it, was 9.01, circa 2004 I think. Sure, it's old, BUT it has all the features I need, is much more user-friendly than Photoshop, and above all it works with WINE in Linux, which is an important point to consider since I abandoned Windows due to their turning an operating system into built-in spyware for all versions after Windows 7.
And yeah, I was a DOS guy, and I wrote programming in BASIC all the way back in the days when programming languages had line numbers to direct the program flow, which to my mind is a far better system than trying to keep up with tab stops to nest programming modules. I also did some programming in FORTRAN, which no one has used for a thousand years other than physicists, I think.
I had to use FORTRAN for one reason, and one reason only - it has a built in inverse tangent trig function (ATAN command), and I was doing complex astronomical coordinate transformations (transforming equatorial coordinates to galactic coordinates in all 3 dimensions) using spherical geometry, which is another thing hardly anyone knows how to use. Spherical trig is a little different - instead of all 3 corners of a triangle adding up to 180 degrees, they add up to 270 degrees, because following the triangle along the surface of a sphere opens the corners up somewhat.
I say this not to toot any horns, since I don't do any of that stuff any more, and have forgotten how to do a fair bit of it, but to show that I'm not the average run of the mill loon who sees ghost faces in old bottles.
Oddly, I didn't use Paint Shop Pro for any of the detail images. I used a rinky-dink Linux image viewer that has nearly no capabilities other than displaying images, and a zoom function via the mouse wheel to "blow up" images just for viewing. I then simply screenshotted the blown up images with another rinlky-dink little Linux program that does nothing but take screen shots. I've not manipulated the images in any way at all other than zooming with the image viewer, and Grace only removed the background and probably resized the image downward. The original image was probably in the 12 to 18 megapixel range.
Mostly all I use Paint Shop for is to paste stuff together onto different background and create new compositions.
.