500 Words XXXV - This Week's Sentence

In honour of Katherine's inclusion of a vampire reference in her last story and also the current obsession of the planet's twelve-year-old girls for all things vamp (I even saw on my regular trawl of the bookshops a new paperback of 'The Picture Of Dorian Grey' vamped up with a brooding teen boy in a cape on the cover … outrageously cynical marketing at its most venal), I have delved this week into the original well and taken our sentence from Bram Stoker's 'Dracula.'

Twilight my fat hairy arse!

This week's sentence is: 'I am alone in the castle with those awful women.'

Gird yourselves with garlic and get writing.

500 Words XXXIV - Story Time

Many grovelling apologies for my blog-lapses of late. I could give you any number of excuses but I'll settle for "The dog ate my homework."

Catching up on our 500 Words stories, the last sentence - if my addled memory serves me correctly was taken from Truman Capote's classic 'In Cold Blood'.

It was:

'While Perry waited in the car, he had gone into the hospital to try and buy a pair of black stockings from a nun.'

I've not had time to think, let alone write just lately, so I shall leave this one to Adonia:

Adonia's 'Part V - Perry'

in which she amazingly manages to weave that utterly implausible sentence into her already developing storyline.

Awesome!

A bonus this week is that Katherine has turned in a late assignment on the previous sentence about Claire.

Katherine's 'The Big Nowhere Indeed'

A writer writing about a writer thinking about writing. And when the writer is as talented as Katherine you just know it's going to be good.

I shall try to come up with a sentence for tomorrow and hopefully may even find the time to start writing again. We shall see …

Bitching Stitching

A big hi to my fellow Photoshop freaks. Today we're back in the darkroom so please excuse any accidental inappropriate touching … or perhaps that should be re-touching.

Ooooh, Paris!
We are back on top of l'Arc de Triomphe, the site of our very first Teeny Tiny post.
This time, we are going to make this widescreen panorama …
(DO click on these for a decent view)

… from this …

… and this!
Yay!
In olden days, stitching photos together to make a panorama was a royal pain in the ass. These days even iPhone cameras can do it for you automatically, but if you want high quality images you can print out, Photoshop is still the place to go.
You can stitch any number of photos together but for today's exercise I am just using two.

I've copied the two images I want to join together into a new Photoshop document and slid one across so that you can see that one is sitting on top of the other.

The little sidebar over on the right shows that each one is on a separate layer.
At the top of the little sidebar's "Layers" section is an "Opacity" slider.

Here I've turned the top photo down to around 50% opacity so you can see through it to the bottom photo. This is not part of the process, simply a way to to demonstrate just how appallingly out of line the two images are; a common hazard when taking panoramic views without a tripod.

Anyhoo … Back to the sidebar and the "Layers" doohickey …
Hold down 'shift' and select both photo layers so they show blue like this.

Then whiz across to the drop down "Edit" menu and select "Auto-Align Layers."
Please note that this feature only came in with CS3, so if you still have an earlier version you can slap me.

Selecting this brings up another little doohickey with some choices for stitching photos together. I've chosen "Perspective" for obvious reasons.

Click "OK" and you get this. Pretty much what you would get if you were overlaying the images the old-fashioned way. You'll notice we can still see the edges of the photos where they overlap.
Let's get rid of that, shall we?

Back to the "Edit" menu and this time we select "Auto-Blend Layers."

Woohoo! Now we're talking!

Rotate your finished image and crop it and then tidy up any final little aberrations with the clone tool or the healing tool, adjust the contrast to suit and hey, presto! A seamless, widescreen Paris!

More Photoshop tomfoolery later.
Enjoy playing!

WTF Monday

More Dicking Around In The Darkroom

I know that several of you are expert in Photoshop (indeed one of you has achieved the rank of Jedi Master), but some of you seem to like this sort of post so I'll keep doing them from time to time.

One of the most popular (and simplest) things people use Photoshop for (at least at home) is correcting the colour on photographs and repairing and retouching old photos that have been scanned in. I'll be dealing with the old photo thang a little later but for now (as I am too busy to do a big post) let's just explore a few ways of

tweaking the colour in photos that have somehow gone astray in the tone department.

The commonest cause of this is pictures taken without flash under fluorescent lights. Fluorescent light tends to give a green cast on daylight film and even modern digital cameras pick up on it.

However, when we visited the magnificently monickered "Le Palais du Fruits" opposite Katie's favourite breakfast café on Rue Montorgueil in Paris, we discovered they use a weird pinkish red fluorescent lighting, presumably to keep the fruit fresh though I have no idea why really.

Anyhoo … looking at this just makes my eyes angry so let's make it a little more visually acceptable.

To correct aberrant colour, most people head for the simplest solution and use the "Auto Colour" tool shown here.

The result is usually pretty good though as tools go it is a little like fixing your TV by banging on the top of it.

Sometimes it works, but there are other, more subtle methods which will give a much better result.

Immediately below the "Auto Colour" tool in the drop down menu is an amazingly good tool called "Curves."

This is the little pop-up screen that you get when you launch it. As well as lots of preset options in the top menu you can play with each individual colour using the "Channels" drop down. We're working in RGB here, so we just get the three colours to play with, but that's quite enough.

First up: let's get rid of some of that red. Simply select "Red" from the drop down channels menu and drag the line off to one side. To the left increases the redness and to the right decreases it.

Of course you can add multiple points on your line and make really swirly lines to finely adjust each colour but we don't need that here.

The result is a whole lot better but the greens need a little tweaking, too, so we grab the green line and move it

up a little.

Yay! Much better than the original and more finely tuned than the "Auto Colour" tool.

Another option (before we get into the really complex world of adjustment channels in a later post) is the method I probably use most, at least for quick-fix colour tweaking for blog posts.

Below the "Curves" tool is "Colour Balance." This does exactly what it says. Open it up and you get three sliders (if you're in RGB mode) and three buttons for shadows, midtones and highlights.

You can see where I'm going with this one, can't you?"

A few quick tweaks and you've got the photo almost right. Yay!

Fine tuning any of the above methods can be done using the "Hue/Saturation" tool (again, we'll get on to far

more powerful contrast, colour and saturation tools another day).

With this, you can mess with the colour saturation (see Katie's posts on classic John Hinde postcards for some awesomely oversaturated colours) over the entire range or - as we're doing here - choose to change the saturation of one or more of a whole range of colours.

Those pesky tomatoes in the foreground still need desaturating so a quick tweak of the slider puts that right. Later we'll be playing with the sponge tool which I could have used to desaturate individual tomatoes, but that's enough for today. I've got work to do.

Enjoy your tweaking!

WTF Monday

So wrong in so many ways.

Disappearing Dive

Howdy.

Many apologies for being too busy to blog at the moment. I will be back as soon as my world stops acting like a Keystone Kops movie.

In the meantime, check out Adonia's latest story, Perry, and I shall try to post another sentence when I can find enough spare time to open a book.

Back soon.

D (currently residing in Insania).

WTF Monday

Hoorah for the good folk at the University of Cambridge!

I so want one of these.

If, however, I were a parent giving this to a little kid for a science project, I think the "build a fire extinguisher" line would scare the crap out of me, especially as it comes AFTER "demonstrate various eruptions."

Making Katie's Masthead

Hey, kids! It's more Photoshop fun!

This time we're making a new masthead for Katie's blog.

She sent me this wonderful old California postcard and wanted me to change it to 'Katiefornia' and put some of her own images inside the letters.

Fun!

Hokay. First up, let's make ourselves a bit of space here.

Open up this doohickey (Canvas Size, from the Image menu).

What we want to do is shift the postcard over to the right to allow for the extra letters.

Simply click on the square with the arrow pointing to it and then type in a figure in the width box. I made it a little wider than I'd need to give me some messing around space.

Click 'Okay' and this is what you see. Lebensraum off to the left.

Next up. I selected the left hand part of the card (the C, A, L and I) and made a copy on a new layer.

After that I carefully cut around the 'O' with the lasso tool and copied that on to another new layer. You can see the layers in the floating palette in the upper right here.

I simply used the paintbrush with black and white cloned from the card to 'paint' the 'O' until it looked like an 'E'. Then I moved the 'CALI' part across to the left to make room for the new letter.

After that, a bit more dicking around with the Clone tool and we have the basic Katiefornia template. I had to warp the layers a little to get them to mesh together but it kinda worked okay.

Next up, Katie gave me a list of the images from her blog that she wanted to see inside the letters. I looked at them and tried to match the image to the shape of the letter.

This one was just right for the 'A' at the right hand end.

So … Cut around the 'A' using the lasso tool, then select the image of the waterskiers and …

… Use the 'Paste Into' tool which conveniently puts the picture of the skiers behind the postcard so it peeps through the hole you cut.

Like this.

Of course it's never the right size, so simply drag it down until it fits.

Yay, skiers!

All we've got to do now is repeat the process with the other letters, cutting around them and using 'Paste Into' to insert Katie's assorted postcards inside.

This was the first draft …

Of course, Katie - being the client - had to make a couple of changes.

She was right to do so of course and the final image looks a lot more balanced for it.

So there you have it. Now go away and play and make your own spiffy blog mastheads!

500 Words XXXIV - This Week's Sentence

This week's sentence is taken from Truman Capote's classic 'In Cold Blood'.

It is:

'While Perry waited in the car, he had gone into the hospital to try and buy a pair of black stockings from a nun.'

Ooooh … Now you know you really can't resist this one. Get jiggy with it, people.

Fuck, Yeah!

The usual grovelling apologies to the incomparable Natalie Dee for stealing another one of her drawings, but hey; I couldn't say it better myself.

The view from my bedroom window this morning

Ditto.

Spring! Enjoy!

500 Words XXXIII - Story Time

This week's sentence was taken from James Ellroy's 'The Big Nowhere'.

It was:

'Claire chain-smoked and drummed her nails on the dashboard.'

We have two Claires for you to meet this week (so far … any others are welcome to join the Claire-a-thon).

Adonia's 'Part IV: Haddy C. McPherson'

Ah, Haddy Claire … From scary old lady to someone suddenly warm and real. Lovely writing, Adonia.

Dive's 'Claire'

Goodness knows where this came from. I suddenly realised when Adonia sent me her story that it was Thursday afternoon already and I'd not written a thing, so please forgive the unedited stream of consciousness of a ten minute, type-it-and-run job.

And also please forgive the weird font sizes my posts have started coming in. I don't seem to be able to do anything about that. Hey ho.

WTF Easter Monday

Yay, Katie, for finding this cute little fella in the Dollar Store.

I wonder what "Hollow Milk" tastes like.

500 Words XXXIII - This Week's Sentence

This week's sentence is taken from James Ellroy's 'The Big Nowhere'.

It is:

'Claire chain-smoked and drummed her nails on the dashboard.'

You've got your assignment. Now go do that voodoo that you do so well.

500 Words XXXII - Story Time

Hokay, so it's a day late but I was too busy to even think, let alone read and write.

Here goes (at last):

This week’s sentence was taken from L. Frank Baum’s ‘The Wonderful Wizard Of Oz’.

It was:
‘Not a tree nor a house broke the broad sweep of flat country that reached to the edge of the sky in all directions.’

Some goodies to enjoy with your coffee this week. Adonia's little Jake is definitely one to watch, Lulu reminisces deliciously and Old Dive retreats into his Norfolk childhood.

Adonia's 'Part III: My Boy Jake'

Yikes! There's a definite edge creeping into Adonia's Jake stories. I can feel something big coming and I'm pretty sure I want to be hiding behind the sofa when it gets here.

Shivery stuff.

Lulu's 'Little Apple'

Ah, the ache of age. Lulu's story this week hits that ache hard with some wonderfully real writing about … well … certainly not about what it's like to be over fifty, darn it.

Dive's 'Prelude To An Incident On Somerleyton Marshes'

If you're a little kid who likes to get out into the countryside and is prone to daydreaming, Norfolk's a pretty good place to grow up in.

Enjoy!