Hope you're all having a wonderful week!
smells like holiday spirit
Today is the last day of November, and despite having one more essay and two exams to go before I break for the winter break (woah 2 breaks in there), I'm already feeling the holiday spirit. Although I'm not the biggest fan of winter once we hit mid-January, up until then I LOVE it. All the store window displays, lights, Christmas trees, snow, skating, holiday specials on TV (you know those cheesy cartoon ones that you still watch even though you're technically too old so you probably shouldn't watch them, but still do) etc. We've started decorating our house for Christmas also, but even though I can't truly enjoy everything till I'm done school, I'm finding my own ways of inflicting some holiday cheer into an otherwise depressing school schedule. I uncovered these tights during the summer, but haven't worn them till now. The pairing of these tights and dress screams Christmas for me. All I need is some green and I'm good to go.
Marciano jacket and dress, unknown tights, Aldo boots, Michael Kors watch, Holt Renfrew beret.
Fully Editable HDR Toning In Adobe Photoshop CS5
One of the much ballyhooed features of Adobe Photoshop CS5 is the ability to take one image and create an image showing some HDR (High Dynamic Range) attributes. Typically, HDR Toning is a one and done technique. It can only be done on a single layer image and once the effect has been applied it’s over. I’m not going to take create for coming up with this “amazing” workaround for this limitation of HDR Toning. For that I’ll differ to Dave Cross, one of the Photoshop Guys from NAPP. His blog of November 26th brought it to my attention and in it he credits his fellow PS Guy Matt Kloskowski for coming up with the idea. Once I saw it I couldn’t wait to give it a shot. I opened Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 3 and picked a folder almost at random. I was looking for something with both bold shapes and defined areas. I chose today’s image because it’s something that is a fairly drab record shot and thought it could use some HDR Toning. Funny thing is that it was shot as a bracketed group with the idea that it might be a candidate for running through CS5’s HDR Pro. Cross/Kloskowski’s method of making HDR Toning flexible is one of those “why didn’t I think of that” type of techniques. It’s an arrow every pixel pusher should have in his/her quiver. To find out about my take on the subject, hit the “read more”.
The whole key to the technique is Smart Objects. It can even be Smart Objects within Smart Objects. One of the ways to make a Layer (or set of Layers) into a Smart Object, and the way that actually popularized Smart Objects, is to use Filters/Convert for Smart Filters. Smart Objects were introduced in CS4 (I believe), but suffered from two tragic flaws. One, no one knew what they were and two, they weren’t the easiest thing to find. Another way to make a Layer (or set of Layers) into a Smart Object is to right click on the Layer in the Layers Panel and select Convert to Smart Object. Either way, with either nomenclature, you end up at the same spot.
Once you’ve made a Layer a Smart Object a small rectangle appears in the lower right corner of the Layer Thumbnail with a tiny icon in it. Clicking on the Layer Thumbnail brings up the root image of the Smart Object as a single Layer. It can be treated just the same as any single Layer image. Therefore, HDR Toning can be applied, along with anything else you may want to do. In today’s image, in addition to HDR Toning, a couple Adjustment Layers were applied. Once you’re satisfied with whatever you’ve done to that based Layer you simply Save and Close (File/Save and File/Close) the image and the Smart Object updates. (Add something or fiddle with the Adjustment Layers, etc.) This way you can edit whatever you did with HDR Toning. One caveat, you’ll only be able to add to the HDR Toning, not reduce the effect back to the Layers original state. That’s not to say you can’t put negative compensation on what you’ve already done, it’s just that you can’t get back to square one.
As anyone who is a regular reader know, I don’t particularly like an HDR effect when it comes to clouds. On today’s image the Smart Object is a copy of the background Layer. Once I was finished playing with the HDR Toning I made a simple Selection of the towers and did a Save Selection to create an Alpha Channel. With the Alpha Channel in place it could be recalled (CTRL Click on the Alpha Channel’s Thumbnail) at any time. With the Alpha Channel selected, the Add Layer Mask icon (third icon from the left at the bottom of the Layers Panel) was clicked and a full mask of the towers applied to the Smart Object. The result was that the original clouds from the non-HDR Toning Layer shown through and I had my nice fluffy unHDR’d clouds.
This technique opens a host of ways to go with HDR Toning. Thanks again (and again and again) to the Photoshop Guys for putting out some of the most advanced tips on how to push Photoshop to (and past) its limits.
rushing
Hello all my lovely readers! This is a very quick post to say that tomorrow I will update with an outfit. I've had a hectic couple weeks, and the next three will also be quite challenging. Nonetheless, my posting will definitely increase over the next weeks. I took a look at my archives and noticed that last November I only had 3 posts (I think I've done better this year), but December was a much better month.
Ps. Almost 200 followers!!! So exciting!!!
Anyways, here are a couple images that one of my friends took of me back in October(? I think).
Off to continue writing papers.
Enjoy the rest of your weekend!
You Don't Have To Go Far In New England
I can’t even think about how many times we’ve jumped in the car, driven a couple hundred miles and not snapped the shutter once. It used to be just a fun afternoon, a lark, some exploration, an excuse to get out of the house. Now days there are other considerations. The price of gas, the ecological effect, the waste of time and, with some folks, the social stigma of not being environmentally friendly. On the other hand, the travel for today’s image was a walk down to the end of the driveway. That’s the view we’d had since moving here more than thirty five years ago. The big difference between then and now is the size of the trees. We used to be able to see that hillside just barely visible through the trees. The road we live on used to be the rail bed for the Shepaug Railroad. The tracks began in the middle of our little town, go up the center of Main Street, down our road, over a trestle and out into the woods heading north for something over thirty miles. One of these days, probably in spring, I’m going to walk the length and document what the route looks like today. It’s people’s backyards, it gets lost for stretches and meanders through a couple of parks. Most people don’t even know why there a berm cutting across their land. Hopefully I can shed a little light (bad pun) on what is a part of the region’s history. There’s a simple explanation about how today’s image was made. It find out what it is, hit the “read more”.
It’s a simple pano. Camera held vertically and a half dozen shots taken in sequence. The camera never left my eye and I simply rotated around the axis I was standing on. There was no tripod, no precise degree shift, no fixed exposure, and no concern about any slight up or down movement from frame to frame. The images were brought into Adobe Photoshop CS5’s amazing panorama stitching application and it did the magic of bringing the pano to life.
Rather than crop the “waste” off the top, bottom and sides, Content Aware Fill was used to “fill in” any gaps due to the blending of the shots. Anywhere the background checkerboard pattern, indicating no image, was found the Magic Wand (W) was used to select the area. The Contiguous checkbox in the Magic Wand’s context options bar was check on. Once all four corners were selected, the area was expanded using the Select/Modify/Expand command by 20 pixels. The reason for this was to give the Content Aware Fill a bit of a bite into the actual image to start its calculations. I find this technique give a better fill, with more accurate extending of limbs and leaves.
Once that was done it was a “routine” job of saturating each color (Red, Yellow, Green, Cyan, Blue, and Magenta) using individual Hue/Saturation Adjustment Layers. I doubt if there was any masking in any of the Adjustment Layers, but it is a good thing to have the option available.
Shhhh, Don't Tell Anyone This Is A Composite.
Ya know, you could stand in front of a scene like today’s image and snap away and have a very nice shot of a marina. You’d have to be at a different marina, ‘cause the sign and the docks don’t line up at Deep River Landing the way it appears in the shot. The sign is over by the entrance, a couple hundred yards to the right of the mooring area and the line of sight is such that you could get a lovely shot of the maintenance buildings just inside the gate. The basic idea behind doing a convincing composite is to make it look like it’s not a composite. It would be the photographic equivalent of trompe l’oeil in the art world. Trompe l’oeil is a French term meaning “deceive the eye”. There are all sorts of examples of the technique that can be found by doing a “Google” search. Some are very clever, totally impossible scenes, some are so realistic you think the artwork is actually three dimensional and some just make you ask yourself the question “is that real?” The people running Deep River Landing could take today’s image and put it on their business cards. People would think it was a great spot and possibly visit. They’d be scratching their heads when they arrived and find things not as they appeared, but that’s what might be called poetic license rather than an attempt at deception. There’s more than meets the eye in what had to be done to create today’s image. To find out what, hit the “read more”.
The backdrop for the sign is a small grove a trees, with one or two branches overhanging the sign. The first thing that was done was making a selection using the Quick Selection Tool (W). A sweep over the sign did a reasonable job of differentiating the sign from the background. For anyone using Adobe Photoshop CS5 (or any recent version) the first thing to do, once you’ve refined the selection should be (in my opinion) to right click on the selection and choose Save Selection. Give the selection a name, and you’ll have it anytime you might need it while working on your image. If you’ve spent any time making a selection you shouldn’t want to remake the same selection several steps down the workflow path. With the selection saved as an Alpha Channel, it’ll be available as long as you own the image (if you save it out as a PSD file. Saving your selections is a great habit to get into and the reward of not doing the same task over and over again is priceless. It really doesn’t matter if you save the sign selection or if you save the background as the selection. As soon as you call it up as an Alpha Channel you can flip it (CTRL I [eye]) to provide whichever positive or negative mask you require.
One of the interesting side notes of today’s image was that I, apparently, held the camera on an angle one way for the sign image and the opposite way for the scene image. Once the two were composited and masked it looked a tad strange. Land tilting one direction and the sign with the opposite cant. The good news is that Free Transform (CTRL T) works independently based on the Layer being fiddled with. So, the scene got a little clockwise nudge and the sign got a bump counterclockwise. When both were finished it looked considerably more natural.There’s a little touchup on the sign to remove the overhanging foliage, but other than that it’s a reasonably straight forward composite.
Back And Forth Between CS5 And LR3
It’s often nice to get out with some friends and do a little shooting. We had a chance to do that a while back and today’s image of a friend is one of the results. One of the things I notice every time we do a group shoot is that no two photographers come back with the same shots. A few of the people out shooting that day were taking shots from across the street in the same general direction the women in the image was aiming at. She was the only person to cross the road and get a unique perspective on whatever was up there. The reasoning behind today’s image is that, just like a group of photographers out shooting bounce back and forth between views of a subject, Adobe Photoshop CS5 and Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 3 bounce back and forth between what they’re good at. I couldn’t have “finished” today’s image “easily” by using only one program or the other. Today’s image started out in LR3, bounced other to CS5 and then back to LR3. The seamlessness of going to and fro is so clear that even if an image needed only one little tweak in CS5 it would be worth it to me to make the jump. Lately, three fellow photographers have asked for my advice about getting LR3. Two use CS5 and one uses Adobe Photoshop Elements 9. One does a combination of “fine art”, editorial and product shots. The other two do fine art and a little wedding photography. So, we actually have three different photographers, each with a different set of needs. To find out what my recommendations are to each friend, hit the “read more”.
The first on the list would be the fine art, editorial, product shot photographer. Editorial and product shots are a no brainer. LR3 would almost be a necessity in this case. For the editorial work the ability to correct for color balance once and apply the same color correction to the whole set of photographs would be huge. With LR3 there’s two ways to accomplish that control. If you’re out shooting on the run and not tethered to a computer you’d use a gray card to get a record shot to use in the digital darkroom when processing the work. Click on the gray card on the target image and then sync the white balance for all the other shots in that same lighting condition. If you are using LR3’s tethered shooting panel it’s even easier. Take your setup shot with the gray card in the scene. Spend a moment and set the white balance. Under Develop Settings on the shooting bar, select “Same as Previous” and shoot away. Every capture will be given the same white balance settings. What a great time saver. So, as far as the editorial and product shots go, a big checkmark, use LR3 and life will be easier. For the fine art “stuff”, a combination of LR3 and either CS5 or PSE9 would handle anything you might need. Depending on how fancy you get with Layer Masks and using Channels would determine which one you’d want. If you don’t know what Channels do you can probably get away with PSE9.
The second case is a fine art and some wedding photographer. He recently “upgraded” from Photoshop 7 to PSE9. Based on what he was using in PS7, I’d call the move to PSE9 an upgrade. I questioned him on how he use the older version of Photoshop and his answers lead me to the conclusion that he would be better served with a simpler product. Should he make the jump to LR3? Based on the type of fine art photography he does and the limited number of weddings he shoots (2 or 3 a year) I recommend he hold off on purchasing LR3. If his wedding shooting increases he might want to revisit getting into LR3.
The third shooter already had CS5 and said he was interested in getting LR3 for the Develop Panel. That’s a red flag right there. If he only wants LR3 for the Develop Panel he’d be wasting his money. He already has all the functionality of the Develop Panel in CS5. It’s called ACR 6.2. The Adobe Camera Raw processor is exactly the same thing as the Develop Panel in LR3. It has all the same controls: targeted adjustment brushes, post crop vignetting , sharpening, noise reduction, camera calibration and anything else you can think of that’s found in LR3. There are other reasons to get LR3, but for the Develop Panel only is not a deal maker. It’s a deal breaker. The Library Module and its rapid sorting, keywording, selection process is great. If he said he needed to output slide shows, the Slideshow Panel would be good. He would have to have multiple needs to be able to justify buying LR3.
Could each of the three photographers find life with LR3 rich and rewarding? Sure, but make sure you know what the benefits and cost savings, money producing results will be before plunking down your money.
A New Sharpening Technique in Adobe Photoshop CS5
There has to be at least a half dozen generally accepted methods of sharpening between Adobe Photoshop CS5 and Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 3. There’s the “ordinary” way, using the Unsharp Mask (Filter/Sharpen/Unsharp Mask), but it doesn’t provide a lot of control over what’s happening to the image. You can go pretty exotic and switch to LAB Mode (Image/Mode/LAB Mode) and sharpen only the Luminance Channel (The L in LAB). You can use a High Pass Filter technique (Filter/Other/High Pass) and that’ll provide more control over the finished sharpening. One thing about every sharpening technique either already mentioned or that will be mentioned should be done on a Smart Object (Filter/Convert for Smart Filters or right click on the Layer icon and select Convert to Smart Object. – Same thing either way.) If you use Lightroom 3 you can crank up the Sharpening in the Detail Panel and control any Noise in the same panel. Very slick. One of the newest sharpening strategies I’ve seen is using the Find Edge Filter (Filter/Stylize/Find Edges) and changing the Blend Mode to CS5’s new Divide Blend Mode. That’s kind of interesting, since the edges are what you want to sharpen anyway. To find out what one step was added to the Find Edges sharpening technique to give the #D like quality of today’s image, hit the “read more”.
If sharpening is done by increasing the contrast along the edge boundaries held within an image and there’s a filter that finds the edges for us (Find Edges filter), we should be able to exploit that to get maximum detail in an image. As was said earlier, all sharpening should be done on a Smart Object to provide the maximum flexibility and adjustability. The first thing to do would be to make a composite Layer of the whole project. While the uppermost Layer as selected, use CTRL/ALT/Shift/E to make a composite Layer on top of everything else. Make a copy of that (CTRL J) and turn off the visibility (that’s for another step).
With the target Layer on make it a Smart Object. Change it to edges (Filter/Stylize/Find Edges) and change the Blend Mode to Divide. Select your sharpening Filter (Filter/Other/High Pass) and add that to the Smart Filter Layer. We’ve already applied the Divide Blend Mode, but we actually want the High Pass Filter to have a Blend Mode of Overlay (or Soft Light). To the right of the words High Pass you can see a symbol that looks like a couple balance beam focal points. Double click on that symbol. A small dialog box opens that gives options for modifying the Opacity and Blend Mode for only that filter. Change the Blend Mode to Overlay (or Soft Light) and use the Opacity sticky slider to fine tune the amount of sharpening.
To me, it gives a three dimensional feeling to the image, all done with sharpening.
Panos The Wrong Way
I can’t imagine a whole lot more being wrong with the way a panorama can be made than what went into today’s image. It started in the camera and continued from there. Every issue was my fault, some by commission and others by omission. The final image came out alright, but it was a lot more work than it had to be. We live, we learn. The original sequence of shots was taken a couple cameras ago. Which is another way to say I wasn’t doing photography at the level I’m at today. I still have a lot to learn, buut I have learned a couple things since the shots for this pano’s time. I listen to my confessions about the errors in today’s image, hit the “read more”.
First was the way the shots were taken. The acceptable method of shooting panoramas when you’ll be stitching together several images is to shoot vertically. This gives you the opportunity to have greater height to the final image. It also means you have to take more shots to get the same width, but since digital film (memory) is free, who cares. So, instead of a half dozen shots, this might have been ten or eleven clicks of the shutter.
The second error was after having Adobe Photoshop CS5 do it magic of stitching and blending the shots to make the starting point of the pano. Because the shots were taken hand held there was a little bounce to the alignment of the shots. (Not bad, but still there.) Because of the length to height ratio of the image, cropping would have just exacerbated the condition. CS5’s Content Aware Fill can be used for more than eliminating unwanted “things” in the middle of an image. It can also be used to fill in the edges of some images after some Free Transform (CTRL T) modifications or to add the fringe of mis-aligned panos. Using the Magic Wand Tool (W) with the Contiguous box checked, each edge of the pano was selected. Using the Fill (Shift F5) function and selecting the Content Aware Fill option the edges were filled and blended. But! I forgot one step that has (typically) become part of the workflow when doing that type of fill. I should have gone to Select/Modify/Expand and made the selected white section grow about twenty pixels. That would give the CAF somewhere to “bite” into. As it was I was left with a set of dashed lines all around the image. I had to waste time using the Healing Brush (J) with CAF clicked on. It was time consuming and unnecessary if I had only not forgotten that one step.
The third Time sink was on the Magenta Hue/Saturation Adjustment Layer. Some areas brightened up a little with the Saturation set to 100%. At first glance it appeared only a couple strong contrast areas needed to have the adjustment taken away by using a Black Brush on the attached Layer mask. It wound up being every mast on every boat and every windshield on every boat. Again, too much time playing with something that should have been pretty automatic.
Along A Foggy Stream
Early morning photography isn’t quite as convenient as it was a couple weeks ago. Daylight Saving Time is gone and we’re back to “Standard Time”. Seeing as the saying is “Spring Ahead, Fall Back” dawn now comes an hour earlier around here. That means, instead of getting up at 5:00 AM to get in place for sunrise at about 7:30 we have a couple of choices to make. It’s either get up at 4:30 or pick someplace a lot closer. With the mornings being crisp and cool, any time we get around water we’ll have some fog. Fog is great for making a stream moody and sometimes a little spooky. Before dawn the time still belongs to the animals, so every once in a while you meet something rather than someone on the trails. That was the case on the trail to today’s image. I’m not really sure what might have been my company, but it grunted and broke twigs as it moved. I might have been up wind of my companion and he/she might have gotten a sniff of me and chose to avoid an encounter, but whatever the reason I’ll glad for the way it worked out. I really didn’t want my last image to be of a large animal in pursuit of my backside. There’s an old adage about how fast do you have to run to outrun a bear? One step faster than the person next to you. Only problem is not having someone with you. Once you’ve thrown your tripod, camera bag and camera your pretty much toast. So, my thanks to whatever was walking the trail the other morning. Today’s image was all about getting some depth to the scene. Fog and mist suck up light and cause a scene to get very soft very quick. To find out how depth was introduced into today’s image, hit the “read more”.
It was tough pulling any color out of today’s image. I went through the usual individual Hue/Saturation Adjustment Layers and got almost nothing back. The dominate color is definitely gray. A very little came up to the near foliage and rocks. Once the scene was beyond ten feet all there was was gray.
To create depth the trees along the left bank were darkened in Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 3. Don’t be afraid to crank whatever adjustment brush you’re using to either very dark or very bright. It really doesn’t matter which way. It’s only there to show is being effected. Once you have the object (in this case the trees) fully “painted” with the Adjustment Brush you can go back and move the sliders and fine tune whatever slider(s) you need.
Without darkening the intermediate trees there would be no separation and a totally flat backdrop. The water and rocks in the foreground would be the primary area of interest and the eye would wander around the image.
baskervilles
We don't get foggy days often, but for the past two days I've woken up to find the world decked in a most gorgeous fog. Today the fog was even heavier than yesterday, and I just had to take photos.
This fog makes me think of Hound of the Baskervilles, my all time favourite Sherlock Holmes mystery. The moors decked in a deep fog...oh, how I wish I could go back to my days of playing detective.
Anyways, outfit inspiration came from Sherlock Holmes and the fog.
American Apparel sweater and skirt, vintage poncho and leggings, Aldo hat and shoes.
jump!
This is the last bunch of photos from October. I honestly can't believe we're halfway through November already. SCARY! Time flies much too fast when you're in school.
H&M Garden Collection dress, unknown tights, Aldo booties, Zara sweater, vintage belt.
Last month I took the time to jump around in the leaves before going to my classes. Although my campus is still beautiful, it's rather sad that there are no more leaves on the trees apart for some rusty coloured ivy on the stone walls. Winter is coming much too fast!
Ps. So sorry I haven't commented back on anyone's blogs. I've got myself buried in readings, there are papers to be written, as well as those random events that pop up and I just can't say no to. December will be much better for blog updates.
Have a wonderful weekend! I'm off to go write 3 essays, and read about a million books. Oh joy!
This Image Needed A Partial Layer Mask
The first mask that was needed was the island Mask. The Blue Channel gave the best initial contrast from which to start. The Calculations Dialog Box (Image/Calculations) was opened. When it opens it populates both Source dropdowns with the channel chosen. In this case it was the Blue Channel. The Blending Mode was set to Normal and the Down Arrow used to cycle through each option. Hard Light gave the best separation between black and white. The Result was set to New Channel and the OK button clicked. The internal areas of the trees had to be hit with a black Brush (B) and the non-island area cleaned up with white. A little cutting around the rocks and the edge of the island finished the Alpha Channel.
A copy of the Background Layer was made (CTRL J). With CTRL pressed the Alpha Channel was selected. The new Layer Mask was clicked and the filled mask applied. The Background Layer was turned off to see what was available and what was hidden. As it happens, the Mask needed to be flipped (CTRL I) to make the island available. A Brightness/Contrast Adjustment Layer was used to bring the island out of the deep shadows. The Adjustment Layer needed to be “clipped” (ALT click between the Layers) to the masked Island to limit the increase in brightness to the island only. A Vibrance Adjustment Layer was also clipped to the island copy to bring out the colors of the island.
Without clipping any more Adjustment Layers the saturation of each color (Red, Yellow, Green, Cyan, Blue, and Magenta) was maximized using individual Hue/Saturation Adjustment Layers. This matched the island to the town.
The second Mask was made from the first mask by adding the town and water to the island Mask. Starting with the island Mask the lower third of the image was painted in using a black Brush (B). The tree line behind the town was added by switching the Blend Mode of the Brush (B) to Overlay and reducing the opacity to about 60%. With the Brush set to black, a couple swipes over the tree line finished the Mask. The image was sharpened using a High Pass Filter (Filter/Other/High Pass) and the island plus town Mask applied to limit the sharpening to the island and town.
Reprise and Explanation
Like all blogs, this one has access to some information about visitors. Nothing personal, but things like where a visitor is from, how many pages were viewed by all the people from a particular city and how long the person spent on the blog. No names, IP addresses or other identifying information is ever given. We use Google Analytics and check the numbers every day to see if a post was popular and if interest in The Kayview Gallery is growing. Thankfully it is. One of the things I notice is that readers seem to check out two pages the most, occasionally three and sometimes a whopping four pages. The two page readers are easy to figure out. They “hit the “read more”” and check out the tutorial portion of the day’s post. The blog has seven posts per page and more than thirty pages. It winds up being more than 230 individual posts. So, obviously, most people have never seen the earlier posts. Today’s main image comes from post number four, back on April 30 2009. Only the earliest and most diehard followers have seen today’s image. The original post (here) only had the finished “cartoon” style image, not the source. Today you get a look at the source to see where it started and what it became. To find out how it got from the source to the final, hit the “read more”.
As you can see, there was some housekeeping to be done before the conversion could be started. From the date you can tell that today’s image was done before the advent to Adobe Photoshop CS5’s Content Aware Fill (CAF). That means the hazard cone had to be removed “old style”, using the Clone Stamp (S). The paper notice taped to the front of the gas pump was removed and a reasonable facsimile of what the meter would look like added. My speedlite, sitting on the top of the pump is still there and, until I just pointed it out would probably have gone unnoticed. The scene was cropped to a 16 x 20 format, eliminating the second pump and the man walking it from “stage left”.
After the housekeeping the colors were exaggerated, several textures applied, things highlighted and things made to recede into the background. Colors were changed and shadows either put in or taken out. The final couple of touches were putting in the wording and “tearing” the edges.A more detailed explanation of what went on can be found in the original post. I thought it might be fun to go back to some of the earlier images and give a little bit of the “back story” about them and show the before and after of where the image came from. If the interest is there this may become a regular feature here at the gallery.
Resensi - The Infamous
Meet Adrianna, tokoh utama di novel The Infamous karya Silvia Arnie ini. Cewek ini baru saja putus dari steady boyfriend-nya karena kesalahan fatal yang nggak lain adalah karena kelakuannya sendiri. Bukannya balas menjadi pacar yang setia, Adrianna malah terlibat affair dengan bosnya. Bukan itu saja, karena tak enak dengan bosnya itu, dia malah keluar dari pekerjaannya.
Beginilah Adrianna versi single: jobless, kuliah belum kelar, dan diomel-omeli ibunya yang tak sabar ingin melihat putrinya itu menikah dengan cowok mapan. Tak suka dengan keadaan itu, Adrianna berjanji pada dirinya sendiri tidak akan melibatkan diri dalam hubungan yang tak jelas. Yakin?
Tokoh Adrianna yang penuh warna ini akan mengingatkan kita pada orang-orang yang sering ditemui di kantor, bisa jadi sahabat, atau malah… diri kita sendiri. Tak bisa memilih, egois di satu waktu, plin-plan di saat yang lain—hey, that’s human nature! Silvia Arnie mampu meramu konsep karakter yang out of the box ini menjadi cerita cinta yang menarik untuk diikuti. (less)
And Now, For Something Totally Different...
If you’re a frequent reader of The Kayview Gallery you know that most of the images have the color saturation maxed out. Big, bright, bold colors that make use of Adobe Photoshop CS5’s Hue/Saturation Adjustment Layers in a reasonably unique way At least I haven’t done the way we do it being used by others. Making a separate Adjustment Layer for each of the possible colors. (Red, Yellow, Green, Cyan, Blue , and Magenta.) The reason for using the ALs in this manner is not so each color can be adjusted independently, but to have a mask available for each color. One part of an image might need a high amount of blue saturation, while other parts go neon with the same amount. Having a mask specifically for the blue adjustment gives the ability to take away the neon blue areas. If the blues in other areas need a different amount of saturation additional blue Adjustment Layers can be added. This gives better control over the results. Better than using shades of gray on a single mask. Several images here on the gallery have had multiple Hue/Saturation Adjustment layers for one or more colors. Today’s image takes the control of the colors through the use of the Hue/Saturation Adjustment Layers in the opposite direction. Today’s image bounced back and forth between Adobe Photoshop CS5 and Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 3 several times. Some things are better done in CS5 and others in LR3. To find out what was done where, hit the “read more”.
First an admission, this is a remake of a very old image. So old that the Meta Data doesn’t even record the date it was originally taken. One of the things I did when I was at Intel was to introduce new digital things to the people in the retail stores. Our team would have all the latest gadgets to take around and amaze the sales people with “the next big thing”. We talked about USB, DVDs, processors and all manner of things as they were coming out on computers. Our team was given some of the first retail level digital cameras to play with in the stores. The first one we had was from HP and was 640 x 480 resolution. Less than one Megapixel images. Today’s image probably comes from the first digital camera I bought for my personal use. It was a three Megapixel Fuji and it was a thousand dollar camera. Today’s image might go back to the early of mid 1990s. Today’s image is a modification of the original alteration of the image as it came out of the camera. Even back then I was altering the images.
What’s different in today’s edition of the image? The bottom quarter was much darker than what’s seen today. The Adjustment Brush in LR3 was used to make targeted adjustments of the water and the rocks. The water got slightly more Brightness than the rocks. The major trees were darkened by reducing the Brightness along their trunks. The rocks along the stream at about the midpoint on the left side got a little bump in brightness, as did the sun lit area on the opposite shore.
One of the major and first adjustments was to remove as much pixelization as possible. Going to the Effects Panel and bringing the Noise Reduction sliders up to the merged the wider surfaces, reducing the appearance of noise. Was it was was actually pixelization due to the low resolution.
The sky was brought down just a touch. Anything to really bring the sky to a deeper blue resulted in red outlines defining each cloud.
An enlargement of the original hangs in our bedroom. It just might be replaced by today’s remake.
poker face
This post comes rather late, but nonetheless, better late than never, right?
Wearing leotard courtesy of Motel, vintage cape and leggings, unknown scarf, Peach shoes.
I didn't go anywhere for Halloween, but I felt that it was necessary to at least dress up to hand out candy. Since my decision was very last moment, I decided to be Lady Gaga, after all, a leotard, and some crazy make-up is all it takes...oh, and a fierce attitude.
I chose to do the poker face make-up but I took ideas from a bunch of her outfits to make my own.
Hope you all like it!
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)