Photo Editing

In this Instructable I will show how I get stills from video on my computer and edit them, this is a great way to make Halloween decorations like posters of the moon and how I made the cover of my book Melodious Verse.

All commercial printing like perfect bind is done on Industrial CNC printers.

I am visually impaired just a fancy way of saying blind, combined with magnifiers, video cameras, scanners, and computers I am able to keep doing the things I like to do. I can’t see my camera to take a photograph, so with digital photography I take thousands of photos sort the useless ones out and work the rest in programs on my computer. Video is great for this as it takes hundreds of frames a minute.

I have a special interest in photographing the moon; almost dead center of the full moon is Murchison Crater. Seen near the center of this satellite photo, Murchison Crater is a lunar crater on the north edge of the Sinus Medii, named in honor of the geologist Sir Roderick Murchison, a fellow clansman. I have tried to photograph the moon many times hot nights can create heat inversions layers of air that blurs the photo, clouds, fog, and timing can rob you of the opportunity to capture the perfect shot since a true full moon happens once every twenty eight days.

Step 1: Video

I am going to start my photo editing from a video I took of the blue moon last month. If you watch the video you will see that most of it is a mess. I will be editing it first in PMB VAIO Edition that came with my Sony computer. This is the same way I made the cover of my book Melodious Verse I video taped the moon on a cloudy night.

Step 2: Video Triming

I start by trimming the video, this is not necessary unless there are large tracts of video I don't want like in the beginning and end of this one.

Open PMB VAIO Edition it should automatically go to your media files.

Click on the Video you want and preview the video.

Click on the icon Trim Video.

Set the in point and the out point and save.

This also saves on memory.

Step 3: Save Frames

Once you have trimmed the video you can go through it frame by frame, just like a motion picture.

Click on Save Frame and a window will open with the frame you are at.

On the arrows below the picture you can go forwards or backwards a frame at a time until you have the frame you want.

Then click on save an it will tell you where it saved the picture.

Step 4: Photo Plus

I have three programs for editing photos Sherif Photo Plus is the one I design my book covers in simply because it has the most text fonts and I can add to my photos with transparent backgrounds.

I start by opening the photo I want to edit.

Depending on the photo I may want to straiten it first however I don't need to on this photo of the moon.

I click on the Crop/ straiten icon and select crop.

I select the section of the photo I want to crop and click OK and am done.

last I preview my work and save.

Step 5: Adding Text With Photo Plus

Here's Robby and Roberta there helping me with this one. In a lot of photos you may only want a narrow strip of the photo and you might not have a lot of space on the photo for cropping. On photos like this straighten the photo first, many photo editing programs automatically crop the edges of the photo.

Click on crop and select straiten.

Use a line in the photo or pick your angle and straiten your photo.

Next crop just like in step 4.

Then click on text.

Select the part of the photo you want the text in.

In the text tool bar select font, font size, and text color.

Then start typing, not all programs will allow you to paste from word.

I am going to keep an eye on these two, I keep finding these silly doodles in my lab.

Step 6: Some of My Creations

As well as saving a bad video I used these programs to make the covers of my books Melodious Verse and Worriers of the Sun.
Not bad for a blind guy Eh.