Paint Shop Pro 8 watercolour effect

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.)

Paint Shop Pro 8 effects

The exact sequence of actions I applied to the original image was:

  1. Soften
  2. One Step Photo Fix x 4
  3. Soften
  4. One Step Photo Fix x 4
  5. Soften
  6. 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.

B!

B!

12 October 2000

Picture below taken at 6 weeks (30 August), but we’ve been waiting until
now to make the formal announcement. It’s now 12 weeks, and this puts us past
the main danger zone for miscarriage, so we feel (relatively) confident
that B will make its appearance somewhere
in the vicinity of 20 April next year.

Happy, me? <grin>

Car? What car?

Exactly.

Almost four months down the line, we still don’t have the car we won. I’ll
put up a full timeline of the ridiculous rigmarole once we actually have it.
For now, all we know is that Toyota failed to send Fuji the invoice for the car
in mid-September. Fuji only cut cheques twice a month, and the next run is at the
end of this week. So, supposedly, Toyota will have the money for the car at some
point next week, and will then be able to hand the car over to us. By that point
we will have had the car insured for a month, at a cost of £60. Seeing as we only
want to sell the damn thing as soon as we get it, we are highly unchuffed
with the whole situation.

MCSD ahoy!

To my surprise, Microsoft send me a letter saying that I am now an MCSD
(Microsoft Certified Solution Developer) a couple of weeks ago. I was surprised
because I had only sat three of the four necessary exams. (I passed VB Desktop &
Distributed earlier in September.) It turns out, though, that
some of the exams I sat about two years ago (WSA I & II) were still valid, and counted
towards my qualification.

Unfortunately, these exams were retired three days after I got the letter.

Fortunately, Microsoft give you six months grace to sit the necessary further
exams to bring the qualification properly up to date. I’ve got myself booked in
for the dreaded 70-100 exam next Monday. Fingers crossed.

-Martin.