Fox and the Fiddle
Posted in Rants by Dewitt | Tags: America, Fiddle, Fox, Liscence, TexasSo this is my first post, and im a little nervous and a little excited, and since this is a rant-ish type thing, i guess a little annoyed at what im about to write about.
Last night, my entire residence floor went out for a friends birthday. We decided to go to The Fox and the Fiddle, which is a nice little bar and grill type place in downtown Waterloo. Everything was fine, It was pretty much empty (who goes to a bar on a monday night?). We had the place to ourselves. For the first time this year, everyone that was going to the bar was actually old enough to be there. And for the first time someone got rejected.
You see one of my friends here is from Texas. Hes Canadian, but has lived in Texas for 14 years. The bartender decided that he didnt know what a legit Texas drivers liscence looks like. And apparently the birth certificate, the BoA cards, the Student card and every other card he could find was not enough. Scott got turned down at the bar because he didn’t know his zodiac sign. If you know yours you probably think its second nature to know it. But half the people on my floor had no clue what theres was either. The bartender lost the buisiness of twenty people, and probably the biggest tip of the week, because he decided to go on a power trip.
We packed up and walked down the road to Chainsaw. Less atmosphere, more karaoke.
Sao Paulo is Billboard free!
Posted in Arts & Culture by Troy Shantz
I’ve never seen anything like this. This honestly made my week, and it just goes to show that an entire community or even a city can change things over night. The only problem I could see with this is that what is going to happen with the lack of ad-space revenue? Wouldn’t that be amazing if the ad industry slowly went the way of the auto industry? I guess all the creative minds that make up the ad agencies around the world would have to use their skills to create stories that do more than sell a product… one can dream, right?
http://weburbanist.com/2010/03/06/clean-city-sao-paulo-scrubbed-of-outdoor-ads/
Linking Life for the Week of March 4th
Posted in Links by Nathan Colquhoun
All the Nice Without the Plastic
Posted in Technology by Ryan YoungYou’ve probably seen photo retouching that looks like the retoucher has taken liquid plastic and poured it over some poor model’s skin. It’s flawless, but you know right away it’s not truly what that person looks like. All of us have imperfections in our skin… on some days more than others (I have a zit on the side of my face today that I’d like to pour some liquid plastic on!).
So the challenge of retouching in most situations is to take away the things that are situational (distracting lighting, color cast, pimples, ruddy skin) and leave all the things intact that make a person naturally beautiful and truly unique. So today I want to take a look at a photo in Photoshop and see if we can make this happen with a few simple tweaks.
A special thanks to Zanetta for letting me use her photo for this. This is a great portrait with just a couple situational things to take care of so that we bring out the natural beauty of the portrait without doing too much to it.
No plastico por favor amigo.
You can download the file if you want to follow along. The only way I’ve changed the original file as you see here is a slight crop which should be pretty easy for you to replicate if you choose to.
Before you begin, copy your layer (ctrl + J) in case you need to revert to your original layer.
1. Most teens and young adults have a bit of acne, so take care of any obvious skin issues first. The healing tool is great for this.
For problem areas closely surrounded by hair, it can be hard to use the healing brush and have things look natural, so a workaround for this is to create a new layer called “skin fix,” sample a skin color close to the area and on your new layer (which should be above the layer you are working on) with brush tool set at low opacity, with a soft edge (20%-30% or so) cover the affected area. If it still looks too severe, you can experiment with the opacity of your layer and blend modes until you get a covering that looks natural).
2. For her skin, in general, the goal is to smooth over anything small that might be distracting, while leaving realistic skin structure like pores and the freckles that she has on her cheeks, intact.
To begin create a new layer. Invert it (ctrl + shift + I) and convert this layer into a smart object (Filter>Convert for Smart Filters). This layer will look odd until we apply the next steps. Choose Filter>Other>High Pass. I would generally choose a setting somewhere between 5-12 depending on the resolution of your photo. Then add Gaussian Blur (generally at about half the radius of your High Pass filter, so my settings were about 7 radius on high pass and 3.5 radius on the Gaussian Blur). The Gaussian Blur will bring the image back into focus a bit. Because we are working with smart filters you can go back and change these values later if you’d like.
Now you should have a nice sheen over your photo, but there are certain areas that we’d like to keep sharp so that they don’t look unusual. Select your smart object layer and at the bottom of your layers palette, click the grey square with the white circle inside of it to place a mask on this layer. Select your layer mask, take a soft-edged brush, make sure the foreground color in your color palette is set to black and begin painting the areas of the image you want to remove the blur from. (On a mask white reveals and black hides). Generally you want to leave this effect on the areas of skin, so paint with a soft black brush over eyes, lips, hair etc, to bring back the clarity in those areas, but leave the skin areas untouched. If you want to see clearly the area that you’ve masked, select your mask and hit the backslash key (\) on your keyboard and it will overlay your image with the mask so that you can make sure there aren’t any gaps. If you accidentally paint over something that you want to bring back, switch to a white brush to bring the slight blur back in.
So at this point we’ve got her skin looking pretty good, but there is a little bit of yellow color cast over the whole image, her skin tone will look a little more natural if we take some of the red out of it, and the whole picture could be just a hair brighter so that our subject’s features will hop out of the photo a little bit more.
4. First we’ll take some of the color saturation out of the image with a color mixer adjustment layer, this will also brighten up the skin tone a bit. With the settings you see below, I set the opacity of the layer at 20% and I masked out the lip and shirt area so that there wouldn’t be any change in color to either of those areas (using a black soft brush over the mask on the channel mixer layer).
5. The image as a whole could still use a little more light, so let’s add a brightness / contrast layer:
This adjustment layer includes a pinch of brightness and I lowered the contrast a bit to reduce some of the contrasty light that was introduced by the channel mixer adjustment layer.
Now our subject should have smooth skin with texture intact that hopefully still looks very natural (cool freckles included)!
Thanks to David Ziser and Katrin Eismann for their inspiration on this technique of using smart objects and filters to retouch skin texture.
Twitter Smellovision
Posted in Photos by Joe ManafoIf Twitter only had smellovision. Crotonese cheese, fresh basil, olive oil, crushed garlic…homemade tomato sauce
Sidney Crosby Lives Up to Media Hype
Posted in Sports by Nathan ColquhounI love a good hockey game. I hate mainstream media. Unfortunately most good hockey games combine the two. So I am forced to listen and watch the media be horrible while I watch a good hockey game. Today’s Olympic Gold Medal game between the USA and Canada was no different. All through the Olympics I have had the onslaught of media attention given to Sidney Crosby and his role in the games. He’s a media goldmine. He wins Stanley Cups, he scores lots of goals and he’s one the better players the world has ever seen. However, there is nothing worse than media expectations on anything.
What ends up happening is you watch the stories of this star player. You here the stats. You get the close-ups on his face. People feel extra good when he does get a point. So what happens with a media star when the guy doesn’t live up to expectations? You give him a second chance at a shootout, even though he didn’t score the first time. Then when he scores the second time, you give all the credit to him for finally meeting the expectations put on him. I’m pretty sure, that if given enough shots, I could score and save the Canadian team also.
In the end I’m glad he scored that final goal. He deserved it, even if not because he played so well, but simply just because he had all that pressure on him to perform, and an entire country that was going to be depressed if they did not win.
Chuck the Mouse??
Posted in Technology by Ryan YoungThis past week my friend Pete came to visit me and he brought a new gadget with him that he recently acquired: a Genius i405 graphics tablet.
People who do a lot of fine detail photo editing or drawing in a program like Photoshop or Illustrator, complain that working with a mouse is tedious and claim that working with a graphic tablet is much easier. This is because edits are made with a movement / pressure sensitive pen that’s more intuitive and faster than mouse-work.
I’ve heard graphic designers, photographers and artists rave about the wonders of a digital tablet, but I gotta say I’m so comfortable with a mouse that I haven’t been convinced that it is worth investing in one.
This week, when Pete offered me a chance to try it out, I was curious. So here’s a quick summary of the “good and bad” of my 30 minute experience:
I’m an “eat the peas on your plate first” kind of person, so let’s start with…
The Bad (or perhaps more adequately called “The Frustrating)
- As a seasoned mouse user, using the pad to move around the Photoshop interface (which you do by drawing your pen across the tablet without touching it) was challenging to say the least. Now to be fair, you can’t really master this kind of thing in 30 minutes. I’m sure if I used this tool all the time the movements would become very intuitive. But this would require a learning curve that might be frustrating for hard-core “mousers” like me.
- I’m used to having very specific control over the size of my brush width. Because the pad was pressure sensitive, I kept botching the retouching job I was experimenting with. I had to push down fairly hard to make the brush it’s actual width / softness and I kept misjudging the sensitivity of the pen causing masking etc, to look weird. This again would likely only be a frustration to noobs like me, because it would take a little getting used to, and the graphic pad I was working on is admittedly an entry level pad.
- The other thing that I was trying to figure out and didn’t find was a quick way to change the width / softness of the brush, right from the pad. There might be a way to do it, I just couldn’t find it, and I know that this particular issue is solved by pads that come with “on-pad” drag spaces that quickly allow you to adjust these brush settings. So I would probably need to sink a little bit of money into a pad to have these features, (which I would need so that I wouldn’t go cuckoo switching between the pad and the keyboard).
The Good
- Using the pad to move my brush around was faster than a mouse once I started getting the hang of it. A mouse is awkward at best and jumpy at its worst when you’re doing fine work like taking a background color out of a flyaway group of hairs on a portrait etc. So the precision of the digital pad and pen (I think once I really learned to use it) is something that I see has great potential for helping with detailed photo retouching.
- Brush strokes with the pen were incredibly fluid! When you’re working with a mouse and you want a continuous brush stroke, you left click, hold it down, pick up the mouse, move the mouse, keep holding, move the mouse, keep holding, move the mouse. You get the idea. With the pen and tablet, continuous strokes were a breeze. In my quick test-drive, I found it easier to blend colors and textures because there were fewer visible edges on my brush strokes.
The Verdict?
Retouching photos is one of my favorite hobbies. It’s something that I find relaxing and that I really want to learn more about. With that in mind, I have to say that I think a good digital tablet would really speed my workflow and be more enjoyable in the end, once I spent the time learning how to really use it. I’m guessing it would take me a couple of weeks to really feel comfortable using it, but in the grand scheme of things that’s not a very long time.
So chuck the mouse? It’s possible. I’ll let you know once I’ve purchased a tablet and spent some time with it. But please don’t tell my mouse, he’ll be sad. Don’t worry buddy, I still need your help to get around Gmail.
Thanks to Pete for letting me take his Genius i405 graphics tablet for a test drive.
Linking Life for the Week of February 25th
Posted in Links by Nathan ColquhounWhy Automated Customer Service Sucks
Posted in Rants by Aaron RobbI recently had to call my hydro company to rebook someone to come change my hydro meter. You’d think that since its something THEY told me that i NEED to do, they would make it easy. But alas, they didn’t. First it took me about 5 minutes of searching their site to find a phone number (I had to actually Google search within their site to find it), then after calling, going through about 5 loops of “Enter ONE for …., TWO for …, etc” they inform me that the waiting time is over 5 minutes and that I should just leave a message. So I think, ‘Sure, that way they have to call ME.” So I press “1″ to leave a message and then the line just disconnects. Since I’m Canadian and apparently very patient I call back thinking that it was just a small glitch and it won’t happen again. But it did. So I called for a third time, and do the old trick of hitting “0″ about 50 times to get an operator. …And the line disconnects again. I may have broken it. So i call a 4th time, wait patently the 5-7 minutes for a real person and get my appointment booked.
So here is what I find is wrong with customer service over the phone:
1. They’re on to our tactics of pressing “0″ 100 times to get an operator. They also don’t seem to acknowledge when you bang the phone on the desk, which really should send a direct message to the president.
2. While I understand the economics of hiring 1/4 of India for your call center, if I can’t understand the person I need to get info from, then you fail.
3. I want to talk to the very happy looking person with the headset on your website. How can I call them?
4. I know technology has advanced much in the past few years, but getting me to SAY what I want to an automated system instead of pressing a button is still not helpful. Slowly telling a computer listening on the other end of the phone that I want to book an appointment is no easier than pressing 4364235.
5. If your phone system cuts people off the line, they tend to get upset. Especially if you’re a phone company.
6. If you’re the president of the company, once a day you should be made to go through your own customer service phone system until you realize it sucks.
7. Once I get a real person on the phone you’d better know everything about your company/service/product, because I don’t want to call someone else or be put on hold while you talk to your supervisor about my problem while you’re really talking about the reason your girlfriend broke up with you with a text message because you called her sister annoying and she’s so close to her sister that it offends her as well.
