I was impressed with PSE11 immediately. The user interface (UI) is simple and based on common sense. The terminology is easy to follow and there are links to help files all over the place. The help files themselves are also simple to understand and actually answer your questions instead of causing more!
For instance, it took me about an hour to create this photo in GIMP:
I cut the moon out of another photo using the "Paths" tool. This is painstaking. I had to click every centimeter or so around the outline of the moon in order to try to get it to come out without any black edges and then figure out how to select the path that I had made (took 2 tutorials to get to the root of it, and they were outdated so it actually wasn't useful info) and then I skewed it so that it was the size I wanted. Next I had to frig with the levels, the hue/sat, and the contrast to get the color tones correct. Next came a tutorial I had to watch to figure out how to export the file properly. Once I had exported it and went into Picasa to put my watermark on I ran into another problem. The file was a .jpg but it kept saying that it was locked or not available when I would try to save my edits in Picasa. Turns out that there is something wrong with how GIMP's new version saves the metadata. After searching through Google file after Google file I finally found out how to fix it. I had to go back and re-export it from GIMP and uncheck the "Optimize" and other boxes that were pre-checked so it just exported the file with no added data. What a pain!!!! But I'm a cheap Scotswoman so I was just dealing with it for the free program. Oh and when I downloaded GIMP in the first place it put some adware on my hard drive that my virus scanner had to kill. Nice.
This next photo was edited using PSE11 last night. It took me about 30 min to figure out and apply the edits that I wanted to get this final result:
I used these two photos to make it:
f/22, 1/30 sec, ISO 800 using 300 mm lens at 300 mm
f/4, 2 sec, ISO 1600 using 70-300 mm lens set at 70 mm
What I did was use the smart lasso tool in PSE and capture the moon. Now, the moon is not quite full so I had some trouble with that lower left corner where its darkest. I had to go into the "Refine Edge" option and shrink my selection area to exclude the darkest bits. After that I just adjusted brightness to make it so it was almost bright as the original but you could still see the crater shadows just enough so that it was realistic.
Then I got a challenge to add a moon to this photo:
Its a photo of my parents' house in Westford, VT. I did a long exposure of 6 seconds at f/8 and 1600 ISO. I removed the noise caused by the long exposure and the high ISO in Lightroom 3. The moon was behind me as this photo was taken at 6:22 pm facing West. I used the same moon photo as above (the one with the black sky) and cut the moon out in the same way. Next I shrank it manually using the little boxes that around surrounding the selection of the moon. I moved it where I wanted and then did the same "Refine Edge" option but since my sky is darker here in this photo I didn't have to shrink my selection as much. I then used one of the layer filters Hard Light blend mode on just the moon and it gave it the right contrast and coloration that I was looking for. The final result is this:
I wasn't completely happy with how it looked right out of the PSE gate so what you also see here in the above photo is my use of Picasa's HDR-ish filter with radius and strength slider almost all the way to the left and slightly faded into the original, and also a slight Orton-ish filter used to "bloom" the highlights and deepen the colors. The end result being slightly surreal but pleasant.
I am looking forward to learning more about this program and hopefully creating some more moonscapes!
