Steve mentions your ship image in “Twilight Zone” terms, and I can see it. As your ship pushed through my mind it dislodged a “Philadelphia Experiment” association. In fairness I should add that the Philadelphia Experiment is an oft-told story about a Navy effort in WWII to teleport a ship using magnetic fields. Debunked – no such thing. But the outlined profile appears to have the quality of a field – an emanation – about it. What better use for this effect than such a boat out on the horizon. It says to me that, when well chosen, the artistic choices in filter can be poetic.

I just realized with some chagrin that I haven’t added my two cents here.

Photoshop offers a regular buffet of options, many of which speed up processes and facilitate experimentation. Quite frankly it’s a matter of which tongs to grab depending upon your diet. I definitely go back to the darkroom days with the red lights and the sharp tang of developer. There was always the element of risk as so much, from a pinhole leak in your camera to a screwed up chemical formulation, could ruin that rare smile on the bear’s snout. The whole thing was an adventure and I figure that it will always attract aficionados, much as steam railroading maintains a fan base.

But from a painter’s point of view, the whole thing is great as one can quickly and easily run through a host of possibilities in preparation for a final image.

I especially enjoyed your transformation technique with the “abstracts.” Viewing all the chips of pure color is like being at the paint store, unable to decide which hues I like best.

My processing skill had been primitive. AP and Adobe illustrator were used to make montages and posters of microscopic or biochemical images.

Yes. Undo will take away the last action you do (just one), whether it’s a filter, a crop, a brushstroke, etc. You can go back and forth between Undo and Redo to compare the states before you move on.

…so long as I don’t “Save” I can always retreat to the original image which will be intact?

Also correct. Until you hit Save, all the actions you took since you opened the image can be wiped out using Revert. This is not reversible like Undo though. If you do ten things and then hit Revert (or just close without saving), there’s no way to Redo those ten actions without doing them again.

But then there’s History. You can set the number of History states in Preferences under “General”. If for instance you have History States set to “20″ (the higher the number, the more RAM memory is used) you can go backward up to 20 steps and then forward again to the most recent. Even after you Save! (But not if you close the image – that clears out the History.) There’s a History palette, which I’m not that familiar with, that can let you navigate states, or you can do what I do and use “Edit>Step Forward” and “Edit>Step Back” to move through the states. Again, until you Save, nothing is committed to. (If you Save, and then decide to Step Back a number of steps, you would have to Save again to lock that in if that’s the way you want it to look. Otherwise your steps back will be lost when you close the image).

Another thing I do a lot is work on new layers, or duplicate existing layers and work on them, leaving the original as a base layer. This obviously doesn’t work for things like cropping and image sizing, but it’s great for painting, adding elements, or even sharpening/blurring. You’ve always got you unaffected base layer to work with right there in the file.

I also tend to group layers together into Layer Groups, which lets me keep things organized, and hide and show multiple layers at once. You can also duplicate a whole Layer Group (including Adjustment layers) from one image to another, which can be very useful.

I have a basic question. I often mess around with settings and then, not liking it, punch “undo.” I have been assuming that that reverts everything back to the original number of pixels, etc. Am I correct?

Or to put it another way, so long as I don’t “Save” I can always retreat to the original image which will be intact?

Thanks again,
June