I have noticed a few photos on Flickr where people have cloned themselves so that there are two or three of them in one picture and decided I would like to have a go at it myself.
I looked into it and found that the way to do it is with the 'history brush' in Photoshop. One small problem is that I don't have Photoshop and at about £600 I am very unlikely to be getting it. I then found out that there is a way to get the same effect in Photoshop Elements with a bit of jiggery-pokery. At about £60 this is more within my scope and is on my wish list.
I had a look in PhotoFiltre – the open source freeware alternative which I do have – and found nothing remotely resembling either the history brush or the Elements workaround. However I did come up with a cunning plan to get a similar effect with the clone stamp tool, and had a bit of a play. The results are not perfect, but not too bad for a first attempt I think, and something for me to play with while I um and ah about getting Photoshop Elements.
A bit more practise with the technical side of it and I'll be ready to try some creative poses.
Now that looks like fun!
Incidentally, I too balked at the price of Photoshop and instead ended up buying Elements from the Amazon marketplace for about £20…
A freind of mine uses photoshop (too technical for me) and he says you can get CS2 for a tenner approx on ebay.
I never even thought of ebay. I must be the last person to have never bought or sold anything there!
I looked on Amazon Marketplace yesterday and saw Elements for £25 – or for about £50 with a free digital camera. The camera deal is not there today.
Also saw someone selling CS2 quite cheap – but only the Polish version…
These copies of CS2 for a tenner on eBay look particularly dodgy…
All the sellers have only been around for a month or two. Makes you think they keep getting closed down when Adobe notices.
Also they are never come with the box or manuals. One seller even stresses that it is a backup made for those who are unable to make their own backups (nudge-nudge) and that once he sells it he is not responsible for what you do with it.
Maybe there are lots of people who have spent £500 on the legitimate software but only have old computers without a CD writer, but it doesn’t seeem likely.
The immediate, practical worry is that these sellers are obviously a bit shady, and do I want to be having credit card transactions with them? (I don’t have PayPal. I had a bit of a row with them.)