The more I play with Paint Shop Pro 8, the more I like it. While I was messing around with our Rome holiday photos, I discovered that the “One Step Photo Fix” action can do far more than just tidy up photos. The image below is what happens when you run the One Step Photo Fix several times on the same image: it applies a kind of watercolour effect. (Click on the image for a bigger version to see it more clearly.)
The exact sequence of actions I applied to the original image was:
- Soften
- One Step Photo Fix x 4
- Soften
- One Step Photo Fix x 4
- Soften
- One Step Photo Fix x 2
The “soften” steps are necessary because the One Step Photo Fix sharpens up edges in the image, and unless you give it a bit of a blur every now and then, you get a lot of pixellation artefacts at the boundaries of blocks of colour.
The photograph carries almost more of its ‘spirit’ or ‘mood’ than the reproduction below. It’s great, giving it an altogether different effect than ageing.