"Effortless perfection"--much Photoshopping required
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Blog: Media standards don't just demand beauty, they demand superhuman perfection.  A side-by-side comparison of a Redbook cover image of Faith Hill and the unretouched original shows how manufactured images of beauty have become.
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What do you think of the new design?  For those of you reading via RSS just click on the permalink.   Fixed layout.  Blue background.  Nice clean sidebar.  No more obsolete links. Updated content.  All to give the appearance that I'm a professional!  This is part of my new effort to blog more now that I have Rojo  launched.  Anyway.  If anything looks strange please let me know!  I'll also be making some additional layout tweaks in the next couple of days.  In the meantime this will do...
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Blog: Database issues are hampering some upgrades to Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 1.1.
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Mikko Koppanen has posted another quick hit ImageMagick hint to his blog - this time it deal with "seam carving", a process for cropping and resampling of an image to make a different composite picture.   Today I was reading trough the ImageMagick ChangeLog and noticed an interesting entry. "Add support for liquid rescaling". I rushed to check the MagickWand API docs and there it was: MagickLiquidRescaleImage! After about ten minutes of hacking the Imagick support was done. Needless to say; I was excited   You'll need to have the libqr library compiled into the ImageMagick installation, but the actual use of the functionality is simple - about three or four lines do the work for you. He includes the original image and the result from his test (as well as another example of the same result image scaled down automatically.
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Just been doing some heavy translation from German to English. Which lead to writing a simple command line tool for translating via Google - waste time to save time in other words. Getting a prototype up from scratch took about 15 minutes (which sheds a light on blog spam I guess). Have cleaned it up a bit and dropping it here in case anyone can use it.
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DevShed concludes their series on using the GD graphics libraries in PHP with thie new article focusing on the use of some of the simple filtering functionality the library has to offer.   In this article I'm going to demonstrate how the GD library can be used to apply some basic graphic filters (yes, like Photoshop, but much simpler) by utilizing the versatility of a brand new function called "imagefilter()". As you'll see shortly, with this function it is possible to reverse, blur and highlight the colors of a determined image, as well as convert it to its grayscale version, among other things.   They use the imagefilter function in a few different examples - altering the colors in an image, working with contrast and brightness and various other filters (like smoothing, embossing, blurring and colorizing).
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PHOTOSHOP ELEMENTS 5.0 and PREMIERE ELEMENTS 3.
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Blog: Database issues are causing trouble for some trying to upgrade to Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 1.1.
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Even though we're custom-design fanatics, we recognize a fine line between the good and the gaudy of DIY creations. Take a tour as we turn our noses up at some of the most tasteless PC mods out there.
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In this new article from PHPBuilder.com today, they walk you through the creation of an online photo gallery system, complete with all of the (simple) features you'd expect.    You've seen them all over the web--image galleries for your viewing pleasure! You've looked for decent image gallery software, but none of them seem to suit your needs, while others have a lot of extra features you don't need. And while you've seen some others that are just what you're looking for, you can't easily integrate them into your website. To solve this problem, I wrote my own photo gallery script and I'm going to share it with you in this article.    They start off with an overview of how the script/site will be set up, and quickly move into the HTML for the pages (the "easy part"). Once they have that and some CSS out of the way, they show some of the PHP code that will get you started. Of course, this is only part one, so you'll have to come back for the rest of the story...
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Tycho:  I should have all the science lined up by the end of the week, ready to stuff into the piano black lozenge I've obtained to celebrate my return to personal computing.  Wish me luck; I've never before had the opportunity to fry four processors at once.       I know things.  Specifically, things that may be of interest to you.  For example, I know if playing Eye of Judgment online is an onerous as it might seem.  It is not!  I cannot express my relief.    Well, let's try.  In my last, vast expose, I broke down a card's unique language and expressed some misgivings about online play - ultimately just accepting it, because what they're trying to do is so weird that there's no prior art.  Essentially, you "register" your thirty card deck with the system itself, where it is stored and named for future use.  This process is extremely straightforward:  it is simply a matter of you laying your cards anywhere on the mat, a few at a time.  It will probably take two minutes if you really keep on it.  Then, you jump online, choose what nation you want to play for, and track down a partner.  At this point, the game will "draw" you your five card hand by showing you the card art onscreen.  You get one Mulligan (or redraw), but if you like your hand you move into the game proper.  We laid out our deck by element, face up, and this smoothed the turn to turn process considerably.      In the build we have, and I hope this is changed for release, it shows you these cards in a single file line without their name or text - just the art.  Once you got familiar with these images, slightly modified from their card format, it's pretty quick - but the names should be displayed on this screen.  You can use the controller to pull up the names, but let's be serious - at no point should the player be forced to interact with a mundane controller once the game is underway.     You should know that the game really wants a well-lit environment.  You don't need a flare gun or anything, but we didn't have what we needed before and certain squares would slow down the game flow with partial reads that would only resolve after several attempts and minute card adjustments.  I should state that here in the office, we removed all the overhead lights, installing a single track of illumination that we point at the ceiling, where lights used to be.  We tend to transform any place we live into a cave.  So, our scenario might be somewhat atypical.    Also, I know if playing Rock Band with all the instruments off of a USB hub is onerous.  You will be happy to know that it is not - we played said instruments spread out on an actual stage, and found it more than satifactory.  The reality is that the drum kit already needs its own wire, so it isn't as though the future had actually arrived anyway.  Plus, the mic isn't wireless either. This makes the contrived brouhaha over wired guitars a fairly transparent traffic ploy.    This is a matter quite apart from Microsoft's reticence to play ball with unique, third party hardware.  And when I say "play ball," I'm taking about the shakedown operation they've got going licensing their wireless technology, which either makes products for their system more expensive or (in the salient case of Rock Band) results in them bundling a wired controller for the same price as a wireless one on a competitor's system.  This is the last holiday they can get away with this sort of thing...  right?
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Plus: Mashups for the masses and HD video in a digital camera.
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Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls... It's with much anticipation that I say this. I have a new product that may be familiar to those of you who used Radio 8, and in other ways may be completely new.  The idea is simple.  There's a convergence between big screen high-definition televisions, and photography as an Internet based activity. The purpose of this product is to smooth that convergence, to make it easy to set up a connection between the Internet and your television. To allow photography to come into your living room in new, powerful and easy ways. Think of it as the networked living room and you'll understand the vision. Some of the work I've done is technical, some is user interface, and some is working with media organizations to try to create a comfort level, or at least a spirit of Let's Give This A Try. In the latter case, it's much like working with the NY Times to get their news headlines and summaries to flow through Radio's RSS aggregator in 2002. Only this time we're working with photographs, and we think, the best news photographers in the world. And the pictures are beautifully high-def, they look really great when displayed on LCD and plasma screens. I use it with my 52-inch Samsung and 46-inch Sony. Of course what looks great on a wall, also looks great on a 15-inch Macbook or 24-inch iMac.   And while we connect those pros with your TV, it's equally important that we connect your friends and families too. One of the early testers found the pictures that Doc Searls uploads to Flickr a great revelation. Me too. That's because Doc is not only a great photographer, he's also a great story-teller. I find that I can follow the lives of far more friends visually than I can through text messages (which I love to do too!). Viewing great photos on bigscreen TVs, desktops and laptops -- that's one focus, but not the only one.  I wanted to provide a complete two-way tool for people who love Flickr, as I do.  Why Flickr? Well, they've got this great thing called an API. It makes it possible for people like me to make software that runs on a desktop computer that does things like automatically backing up your new photos every night, and providing a drop-folder on your desktop for quick uploads. (It understands tags too, it's incredibly simple.) We also made it easy to post pictures you like to Twitter. Why Twitter? It's that API thing again. They made it easy for us to love them. I wish more network service developers understood how powerful this outstretched hand is.  But that's not all! Not by a long shot. The reason all this will be so familiar to Radio 8 users is that it builds on the same engine, the one that was released as open source in 2004. So I've been working on other tools to drop into this base platform and once we have a good-sized base of people using it for "really simple photos" on the desktop, there will be other tools. And because it's an open platform, other developers can do the same. Not saying they will, but they can.  Anyway, I'm in the last stages, preparing the download site, and a FAQ, and tweaking the installer. One caveat, the first beta release is Mac only. That's because I'm doing all my work on the Mac, and this is a one-man show. Later we will work it out for Windows too, and with a bit more work and a bit more luck, for Linux.  It should be ready before the sun goes down today.
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THE modern PC is a marvel, isn&#39;t it? Here&#39;s a machine that lets an ordinary person with very little training create a new document, check its spelling, dress it up with graphics, send it electronically
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Attention to details and solid advice make up for less-than-stellar graphics.
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A 7200rpm unit that's as fast as a 10,000rpm job, apparently
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On phpied.com, there's this new post that shares Stoyan's lazy way to resize images in PHP - with the help of the PEAR::Image_Transform package.   Today I saw a post at digg.com on image resizing with PHP and there was quite a discussion. Let me share the laziest way (that I know of) how to do it - PEAR::Image_Transform is all it takes.   His code is only five lines log and takes in a JPG image and resizes it down to a 100x100 pixel image to output as a PNG. He also mentions some of the other functionality the package has, including lots of other image manipulation extensions.