It’s a Gingerbread Christmas

Still my favorite PhotoImpact kit and tutorial for Christmas by Stephanie Baker-Thomas with a few subtle additions including my Icings preset, which you can download directly here until January 2nd.

Over on “Letters Home,” Ian has written up a wonderful tale of another gingerbread house (and follow up).

And little did we know this was going to turn into an Internet meme!

Gingerbread Houses 2011 gallery - distinguished renditions of the culinary custom share.yhoo.it/6xP

—
  (@Flickr) December 25, 2011

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

Oh and thank you @chrisbrogan for pointing out that Straight No Chaser’s “The 12 Days of Christmas” is on youtube

Sheeee’s baaack!

Wishing all my friends who celebrate, a very happy and safe Halloween. (Once upon a time, of course, you didn’t need to add “safe” to your greeting and it makes me infinitely sad that we do now.)

In spirit, I’ll be going with you door-to-door, pillowcase in hand trying to quell my insatiable craving for mini-Butterfingers.

PI users: if you’d like the UFO for Emily (figure only), just drop me a comment with a working email address. The font used here is Gorey, both on the headstone and a bit distorted for the greeting itself.

More Ghoulish Goodness on this site:
Vincent
The Zombielections Are Coming!
One for the Ghouls

Win7, Bamboo Touch and Corel Painter Essentials 4, Oh My!

This past summer, I had a wonderful visit abroad with family and friends (more on that another time) and came home with a new-ish computer free-of-charge. My previous 6 year-old computer was running WinXP and my biggest hesitation to upgrading to Win7 was losing the ability to run my beloved and familiar PhotoImpact8. I’ve never upgraded to a newer version and when Corel bought PI in 2007, they discontinued it in favor of their own graphics programs. (Surprise! Not!!)

Which brings me to the reason for this post. My old Graphire tablet obviously (obviously!) wasn’t going to make the transition to the new computer thanks to hardware changes, so when the Friday paper came with an ad for the Wacom Bamboo Fun Pen & Touch with 3 free full-version graphics programs included, I dashed to the local computer shop with cash in hand. After spending a weekend installing and setting up the downloaded programs, it became apparent that Corel Painter Essentials 4 was the ugly duckling and refused to install and run correctly. Contacting the local Wacom distributor’s support was like putting my finger in a pencil sharpener and after 3 email exchanges with them (what can I say other than I’m stubborn and have a high tolerance for pain), it was clear I was on my own to solve this problem.

I finally found the answer to Painter Essentials 4 hangs on startup in Win7/64-bit in the reply given by Craig in a Windows7 Compatibility forum. Once I created the Color Profiles folder following Craig’s advice, the program successfully installed and I could update to v4.3, which is compatible with Win7. Putting this information out there will, hopefully, help other frustrated Corel customers.

So, what happened in the end with PI8, you might be asking? It’s here too, running in compatibility mode and (tfU! tFU! TFU!) so far, so good.

Made in PE4 and finessed in PI8

PhotoImpact Talk

Every time I view my stats it amazes me to see how many people arrive here from searches on WordPress.com or Google for PhotoImpact; amazes me even more since Corel has seemingly dropped development of PI in favor of PaintShopPro (formerly owned by Jasc), now called PaintShop Photo Pro.  Oddly, there aren’t more PI-centric (or PSP or PSPP) WordPress.com blogs out there, but I guess in the long run it’s better to be a big fish in a little pond than vice versa.

It also amazes me that in spite of the many PI-related visits, you’ve left almost no feedback on what you’re looking for when you arrive here.  To that end I’ve just opened up “PhotoImpact Talk“, a place where PI users can hang out and talk about their favorite app. Come on over and say “hi!”

Vintage PI Goodies for Valentine’s Day 2010

This is a new set of much-requested Vintage Cutouts, available for you to download through the end of this month.  Again, these cutouts were created using Caroloyl’s excellent tubin’ tutorial with the exception of my preference for using a Wacom tablet and a small paintbrush to tidy the cutout rather than the Path/Bezier tool in selection mode.

In addition to the Vintage Cutouts Library UOL, I’ve also included in this download a toolset to help you make your own cutouts:

• A Custom Brush preset for cleaning up your objects (no drawing tablet required, though preferred)
• A” Zoom to 600%” SMP for easy zooming.

Click on the image to download and save the 3.9M zip file to your computer’s hard drive. Apologies for the file size, but these are fairly large image objects. If you have any problem with the download, please leave a comment. See also the ToU included in the file for any additional limitations on use of these Vintage cutouts.

Fontaholics will recognize the font here as French Script MT, available on most computers running an MS product.

This PI Goody is being released under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 License. As always, any question about this license or how to use my Goodies are always welcome.

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