Brooklands Photographic Society, Sutton on Hull, East Yorkshire, UK

TIPS for finding and getting the best out of OLD MAPS and PSP

www.old-maps.co.uk

Type in your chosen town or village in the search box. Hit GO.

When the modern map loads, it will probably be off-centre to exactly where you want. Drag the shaded box on the modern map to where you want to be, and click your spot to centre it.

extra tip: use Bing Maps (used to be Multimap) for full screen maps, including O/S, to better locate where you want to be. Open Old Maps in one tab, and Bing Maps in the other. Easy peasy.

Back to Old Maps:
In the right-hand box of maps, select the date of the map your choice. Note that there are many more than you can immediately see, so pull the slider down for the rest. Available maps typically go from around 1855 right through to post-WW2 and the 1970s.

Maps of a 1:2,500 scale are FOUR TIMES better than the standard 1:10,500, and show field boundaries, street trees and tramlines. Clicking ENLARGE MAP will download it and it will pop up in the main display box.

Then click ENHANCED ZOOM in the main map, followed by that little icon on the extreme right of the row of icons near the bottom of the screen. But only click ADD TO CART if you intend to purchase the map.

When it’s full screen, hit the PrtScrn button on top of your keyboard, to the right somewhere of F12. That will take a screenshot of the whole screen. Be careful to hide the mouse pointer away, or you'll get that in the shot too.

Then open your art programme and paste it in. Ctrl+V works a treat. Crop as necessary, and save. It can be pasted in MS Paint just as easily for quickness, but of course, that is much more limited in what you can do then. For that matter it can be pasted into the usual camera photo editing suites that come with most cameras; ie: treat as for a photo.

Enjoy. Serves 4.

TIPS for installing the Workspace file
to use all the most useful tools in PSP

The file needs to be copied from your memory stick or email and dropped into a sub-folder in your My Documents folder.

After PSP has been installed, open "My Documents" in your file viewer (go in via My Computer if you wish), and you'll see a sub-folder, "My PSP Files". Your My Documents folder may be under your own name on the computer, or just called "User".

In "My PSP Files" is a sub-folder called "Workspaces", right at the bottom of the list. In there will already be a file, called "Default.PspWorkspace". Just add the new file into the same folder. When you next open PSP, go to Workspace in the File Menu, and click load. Don't bother with the option to save the existing workspace, because you haven't altered it. The requester window will open, select your new Workspace and click enter. Job done.

All the tools I showed you are there, but they'll probably be all on one line and disappearing off to the right of the screen. You need to find the separator between the two toolbars, and drag it to the left to position it under the existing top toobar. I usually keep the toolbar with OPEN, SAVE, PRINT, PRINT LAYOUT, etc, on the top. Underneath, I keep the one starting with the HAND, for dragging, MAGNIFY and selector tools.

None of the toolbars will light up, ie, will be greyed out, until you actually open a picture, or create a blank page. Then off you go. Enjoy.

TIPS for using PSP and getting quick results

One of the most immediate and useful tools in PSP is the ONE STEP PHOTO FIX. It does what it says on the tin. If you load a photo and click that button first of all, PSP will execute five or six separate actions all in one go. Depending on the size of the photo, 20 seconds usually sees the job done. Automatic contrast, automatic colour balance, sharpening and other enhancing features are within that one button, making it a sort of macro button.

Having done that, assuming that spots, dots, blemishes tears and scratches have all been edited out, another most useful tool is CLARIFY. That seems to enhance the contrast further, but does it taking account of the already existing dark and light areas of a photo. When I first used it, I thought it was a form of alchemy!

Many of the other tools are just about self-explanatory. Amongst the buttons that I've added to the toolbars that aren't available on the default toolbar are;
SEPIA ♥ NEGATIVE IMAGE ♦ CLONE ♠ COLOUR REPLACER ♣ PUSH BRUSH ♦ SCRATCH REMOVER ♥ FLIP ♣ MIRROR and ROTATE tools ♠ RESIZE CANVAS ♣ RESIZE IMAGE (those two are not the same) ♦ and LIGHTEN and DARKEN.

There's a drop-down menu at the side of LIGHTEN & DARKEN, with three further tools, the bottom one of which is CHANGE TO TARGET. This is the ideal tool to use for tinting a photo. So when you have a black and white image, and you want to tint an old wedding photo to give an idea of the colours used on the day, it can be very effective, giving the same result as when photographers studios used to tint photos years ago.

Some folks used to buy photo tinting inks and do the job themselves, with great results. It's easier than it sounds, trust me. Remember to use a very low OPACITY, probably 20 or less to tint a man's dark suit a shade of blue, for instance. To tint a white wedding dress pale green, use perhaps an opacity of 40, and select a pale green for your colour. Choose a yellowish-pink and a low opacity to tint faces, arms and hands. Experiment, you'll get the hang of it.

There are many other tools, many other processes, some of which even I haven't touched or experimented with, within PSP. You can even get technical and play around with layers, masks, artistic and distortion effects, all the gizmos you'd expect in a far more expensive programme. All I can advise is play with it, experiment, see what it may do for you. It really is a better programme than it first seems, and for sheer quickness and immediacy, my personal opinion is that it's peerless.