Feeling Sad About "noreply-comment@blogger.com"

Thank you for all of the comments that you left on my last post about this year's first roses in the garden.  I appreciate each and every kind word that you take the time to leave behind during your visit.  Each comment is a gift, and I am thankful that you choose to spend time on my little slice of the Internet.

I try to send a private email reply to most of the comments that I receive.  (depending on what else is going on, sometimes I'm better about this than other times.)  Six of the comments I received on that last post were from lovely readers who may or may not know that their email addresses are not visible in their profile.  I always return the favor and visit blogs in exchange ... sometimes finding treasures that I continue to return to again and again.  Honestly, though, it's still not the same as being able to share a private conversation with someone ... via email, that is.

Preaching to the choir?  Beating a dead horse?  I still have to give this a shot, in case I can reach just ONE blogger and help them build their network and their friendships.

Do you know if you are a No Reply blogger?  If you are on Blogger, here's how to check. 

1.  Click on the "B" icon at the top of your blog home page.

 

 

2.  Click on the icon in either corner of the Blogger overview page to access your profile.

 

 

 

3.  Click the orange 'Edit Profile' button.

 

 

 

4.  Check the box that says, "Show my email address".

 

 

 

5.  Scroll to the bottom of that page, click "Save Profile".

 

 

 

That's all there is to it!  (If you use another blogging service and do not have a Blogger Profile, I know there are ways to do this, I just don't know what they are.)

 

I make this plea at least twice a year, usually when I receive a frustratingly large number of comments that I cannot reply to.  I know that some of you may have consciously chosen to not reveal your email address ... it's your email and your choice and I respect that.  Others, and I have found this to be the majority of no reply bloggers, don't realize that this is the case for them.  (This is especially true for new bloggers.)

 

Make this change and I guarantee that your blogging experience will be a richer one. For me, direct email contact has led to online and real-live-in-person friendships that I would not have otherwise.

 

Now go check your profile and let me know what you find.

 

Are You Invisible?

Thank you for all of the wonderful comments yesterday regarding my glove problem.  It was very comforting to hear that many of you are plagued with the same issue ... whether the orphan items are gloves or socks.  Most of you have heard back from me via email.  I always try to send replies and thank yous, because I truly DO appreciate the time each of you takes to read my little slice of cyberspace. 

If you did not receive an reply from me, it is because your address was not visible when your comment was sent to my Inbox.  This is the default setting in your Blogger Profile.  This is SOOO easy to change, and doing so will open up your blogging experience far beyond where it is now.  Remember what I said the other day about making personal connections with other bloggers?  You can't do this if your email isn't visible so you can take your conversation offline and into private emails.

It is super easy to make this change.  Let's get to it:

1.  Open your blog and click on the red Blogger icon to go to your Dashboard.

2.  Click 'Edit Profile'.

3.  In the Privacy section, check the box that says "Show My Email Address".

4.  Scroll down to the 'Identity' section and type in an email address, if there isn't one there already.

5.  Scroll to the bottom of the page and click "Save Profile".

Done!!

This is an issue that is very important to me, and quite a few other bloggers that I know.  I struggle with it every day, as new readers visit and leave comments, and I can't contact them to let them know how much I appreciate their visit.  When someone asks a question with general interest, I try to answer it in the comments, but I don't want to put personal replies there.  Truthfully, I almost never go back to someone's blog to see if my comment has been answered publicly ... I know I can subscribe to subsequent comments via email, but I created quite a log jam in my inbox by doing that one time.

If you have consciously chosen to be a noreply-comment Blogger, may I be so bold as to ask why?  Part of what I love so much about blogging is learning from others ... and I really want to know what led you to your decision.

As I say in my greeting in my comment form ... noreply-comment@blogger.com is a bummer!

PhotoShop Lesson: Accentuating Snowy Trees

Thank you for all of the lovely compliments on my snow photos yesterday.  Most of the success of these photos was because the light during the snowstorm was completely perfect.  All I had to do was adjust the White Balance on my camera, frame the shots, and click away. 

When I loaded the memory card into my laptop to view the photos, I decided that they could use a little bit of tweaking, a lot like I did when I used to develop photos in the darkroom in the Dark Ages of film photography.  It was a simple matter to use PhotoShop to darken the trees, increase the contrast, and sharpen up the blowing snow.

Here is what the photo of the three trees looked like straight out of the camera.  It's okay, but I knew it could be better.

After we finish with it, it will look like this:

Open the photo in PhotoShop.  The first thing I did was adjust the size of the image to 640 x 480, so I was working on the image in its actual size.

To adjust the levels to darken the trees, Click 'Image',  'Adjust',  'Levels'.

And you get a pop-up window that looks like this.  Click on the black eyedropper icon, then click somewhere on the photo that you want to tell PhotoShop should be true black.  I clicked on the center of the hollow part of the front tree.  If you don't get the result you want when you click on the photo the first time, click around until you like what you see.  If you totally hate the results, click Cancel and close the window, and your photo will remain unchanged.

My next step was to increase the white range (Don't quote me on this terminology, because I don't know if that's what it's really called.)  Again, click to adjust the Levels.  This time, I grabbed the white-point slider and I moved it until I liked what I saw.

To make a sharper contrast between the lights and the darks, click 'Image', 'Adjust', 'Brightness/Contrast'.  Click and hold the sliders, and drag them where you think the photo looks best.  I brightened the photo a bit, and increased the contrast considerably.

If you look at the original photo, you see that I had to deal with the pesky issue of my daughter's car antenna in the lower left corner.  This distraction was dispatched fairly quickly with a few strokes of the PhotoShop airbrush.  (I can show you how to use airbrushing later, if there's interest.)  The "H" on my Hartwood Roses watermark disguised the fact that there was ever an antenna in the picture.

The last step is to sharpen the photo, to accentuate the texture and details, and to focus on the emotion of the blowing snow.  Click 'Filter', 'Sharpen', 'Sharpen'.

That's all there is to it!

I use PhotoShop 6.0, which is the oldest version of PhotoShop that will run on my new laptop.  There are newer versions out there, but they are considerably different than what I'm used to and I didn't want to have to learn how to use them.  I have never used any other photo program besides PhotoShop, but I imagine that the concept of adjusting levels and contrast and sharpening images is similar no matter what program you have.

Class is over.  Any questions?