Recently, I was fortunate enough to visit San Antonio, Texas. I've been fascinated for years by the Alamo and its history and so a trip to it was compulsory while in town. My son gave me a disposable Kodak camera to take pictures while I was there. It was a great way to get the job done. After the pictures were developed, they were scanned for posterity with an Agfa Snapscan 50 scanner and saved in TIFF format to retain as much detail as possible. I then used various features of Adobe Photoshop Elements to compose these pages.

So, welcome to the Alamo, the "Shrine of Texas Liberty", Misión San Antonio de Valero

Related Websites:

• http://www.thealamo.org - Official Alamo Website
• http://www.earlytexashistory.com/ - Additional resources detailing Texas history
• http://www.kwanah.com/txmilmus/flags/eaglemt2.htm - Pictures and details of the flags that have flown over Texas

• http://thesanantonioriverwalk.com/ - Take a tour of the Downtown Riverwalk
• http://hotx.com/sa/tours/PDA-APTours/ap01a.html - Quicktime VR tour of the Alamo and Downtown San Antonio (under reconstruction)
• http://www.lavillita.com/ - Office site of the village at the heart of downtown San Antonio

Photoshop Elements Techniques

Throughout the picture tour, I used Photoshop Elements to enhance the pictures and to incorporate various features into the site. Details appear where appropriate.

The original pictures were saved in TIFF format. Each of them were over a MB in size. To use the images on this site, I needed them in JPG format. Elements has a Batch option as part of the Automate feature from the File menu. I had the program batch convert all of these images to the much smaller and more web friendly JPG format. This shrunk the filesize considerably.

However, if you happen to visit via a dialup connection, even file sizes of 100KB can take a while to load. So, it was back for another Batch Automation to make them smaller (~30KB) so that they would load quicker. For each image, I created the ability to spawn a popup window so that you can see the original.

While automating...I used the Web Gallery option from the File menu to create the starting point for the pages. Sitting back and watching Elements do its thing is quite interesting!

The title above was also created with Elements. It's actually three layers. The bottom layer is a picture of the Alamo facade. On top of that, I put a picture of the Texas flag. Both of these layers had their opacity adjusted so that both were visible. On top, I added a top layer with no opacity for the text and used the Wood Paneling effect to the text. Finally, using the Wood Frame effect from the Effect tab gives a nice frame to the title.