Hoppy Easter!

Wishing all that celebrate, a very Joyous Easter!

(From another of my favorite holiday PhotoImpact Tutorials by Stephanie Baker-Thomas.)

Straight from the PhotoImpact Goodie Graveyard!

Drac

Frankie

RIP

Vanessa

This year’s seasonal seance has brought my Halloween Menagerie back from the dead.  (Sadly, can’t say the same for Ulead’s PhotoImpact, since Corel gleefully drove a stake through its heart!)

In case you’ve missed the annual visitation, I started this Menagerie back in 2003 using PI v8 and have enjoyed creating each new creature from leftover body parts from the year before (Vanessa’s hand is up there in my site’s header). So don’t lose your head, but if you work with any version of PhotoImpact, make sure to take apart these UFO files. They’re hiding a few surprises. Click on the image caption above to download any or all of the ZIP files containing the full-figure UFO (not just a head-shot). But just like a good Halloween Trick-or-Treat, these files will disappear on November 1st.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

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