Saturday, March 31st, 2007
by William
After 2 weeks of no activity on Daily !mg (My photo blog), I’ve finally decided to update it since I’ve got enough photos. Including my visit to seattle, future of flight and vancover downtown photos.
Here’s a random picture from Daily !mg
By the way, be sure to subscribe to the feed, leave comments, and rate the pictures!
Saturday, March 31st, 2007
by William
whos.amung.us is a widget for any webpage or blog that I stumbled upon this week. I hadn’t gotten anytime to put it up until today. What this ‘thing’ does is showing how many people are on my site/blog (in real-time). Also, clicking on this will let the user see all of the pages that people are on and it will show them the popular pages (sort of like sitemeter).
Well, here’s the widget in real time!
Friday, March 30th, 2007
by William
Just a little update:
More and better pictures can be found here: http://images.appleinsider.com/adobe-cs3-boxes-070325.jpg
The pictures aren’t the best quality in the world but they look pretty fresh and abstract. At least people now can see that these softwares are related to art…
Quote from some beginner way back
“does photoshop cs work on windows?”
It’s pretty self explanatory now.
Oh yea, be sure to comment which of the box design is the best!
Friday, March 30th, 2007
by William
%201.jpg)
Personally, I am a ‘black theme’ personal so I loved the black theme. Wait, let’s step back a bit, I found out this website on this day and also he has many posts that I like. Definitally recommended if you are looking for fresh content and of course, mac peoples!
Friday, March 30th, 2007
by William
These two days were horrible. First off, starting with today, I had three different podcasts to record. And I accidentally overwrote the seond one with the third one so I had to recover it later on and redo the intro. Well, at least ‘Your Science Guy with Rang’ is out and available for downloading at Beyond! Podcasts. Then it was people going after me because I have quoted their copyrighted material.
Let me quote this (because this is a personal post, and this is a daily blog post):
“It appears that you’re republishing Engadget’s feed on your site. Please note that republishing our feed in whole is in violation of Weblogs, Inc. and AOL copyright and terms of service… ”
Er… sure. Here’s one more
“I believe my rights have been infringed under 17 U.S.C. Section 101 et seq. Copyright infringement is a serious issue. I request that you please remove the infringing content from your site immediately… ”
Of course, I had to removed all of the copyrighted materials.
Quoting massively is wrong way to go.
Conclusion: So, from now on, I shall post in my own words and use less quotes.
And what about MrChinese
… his blog is Chinese so no one cares about copyright even if he quotes massively…
Thursday, March 29th, 2007
by William
Sorry for redistribution your content, especially Engadget.
From now on, I’ll only post small quotes from the orginal content and link back to whoever it was so readers can go there and view it. Hope that helps. Sorry again.
Thursday, March 29th, 2007
by William
Fitness test anyone?
Quote – Read more from http://consumerist.com/consumer/google/google-suggests-you-swim-across-the-atlantic-ocean-248199.php:
You can’t always rely on the advice of computers, especially when it comes to transoceanic driving directions. From Upgrade: Travel Better:
Google, either encouraging physical fitness or zero population growth, offers the above helpful suggestion when mapping the route from Chicago to London.
Click here for the full directions and map of the route.—MEGHANN MARCO
Wednesday, March 28th, 2007
by William
Morning:
usual, nothing much happened
Lunch:
saw her when I was in the cafe lining up to buy stuff, nervous because I have a chemistry test next class after lunch.
Afternoon:
well, the test is based on Science history and chemistry equation. It was ok. After coming out the doors of the science wing, (SOMETHING HAPPENED)(not important to you so you don’t need to know). Info tech was usual, I was trying to read PHP reference book while listening to mr.lavery blabbing… and as usual, I help people out on 3d stuff because I’ve have experience with 3ds max. (feel good because I can apply my 3ds max skills to rhino 3d software)
Sort of going to the night:
Noooooooooooooooo! Our server is down, dreamhost is down. First, it was only an email system that was down and then…
Quote:
6:47PM PST March 28th, 2007
We just had a drop in our network for about half our servers.. if you can’t access your site or email now, please hold on.. we are looking into it and will update this page as soon as we have more details..
7:15PM PST
We’re still actively trying to diagnose and fix the problem.. it seems to possibly be a physical problem with one of the fiber cables between two of our data centers. We’ll post further updates here as we progress. Thank you very much for your patience and we apologize for the downtime this is causing.
7:20PM PST
We experienced a failure in one of our 10gigabit network interfaces. We swapped it out for a spare one and we believe we are back up and running! There may be some residual problems where some servers need to be rebooted, however the root cause of the problem is fixed. Please let us know if you are still experiencing any further problems!
The ” Our apologies again..” was added 5 mins after 7:20PM…
Wednesday, March 28th, 2007
by William
Very nifty, waiting to get my hands on this.
Quote – Read more from http://www.zoom-in.com/blog/2007/03/first_impressions_top_5_stando.php:
Adobe Photoshop CS3: Top 5 Standout New Features
Upon first digging into Adobe Photoshop CS3, a few features have really popped out at me as incredibly useful. I would like to offer a brief overview of some of these new ways of attacking your creative challenges using the latest version of Adobe’s flagship app. PsCS3 will run you about $649 to buy it outright if you do not own any previous versions. If you own Photoshop 7, CS, or CS2, you are eligible for upgrade pricing – looks like $199 for the upgrade. Check Adobe’s store on their website for more info. For more information about what comes in the different versions of CS3, and what your suite configuration options are, see my previous post.
My current favorite five new PsCS3 features in order are:
1. Nondestructive Smart Filters
2. Quick Selection Tool & Refine Edge
3. Photomerge with advanced alignment and blending
4. Automatic layer alignment and blending
5. Vanishing Point with adjustable angle
Feature Overviews:
Nondestructive Smart Filters
Adobe has finally given us non-linear, nondestructive filters. Can I just say “HOORAY!” In the past, you applied filters and effects in a linear order: one filter would alter your image, and the second filter would alter your now altered image, and a third filter would alter the altered altered image. The problem with that workflow is that if you decide you want to slightly tweak the second filter, you’d have to either undo back to that point (losing your subsequent edits), or use the history palette to step directly “back in time” to the point before you added the second filter, add your “revised” second filter and then add your third manually. All too often, you don’t quite remember what exact parameters you had set on that third one – or worse, your real world project involved applying 20 filters instead of the 3 in my example and changing the second filter would mean redoing the 18 that follow it. What a drag. Because of this issue, people developed many work arounds (often involving saving off multiple “partially completed” versions of files all over your hard drive with iterative file names, hoping that if you needed to go back to a certain point in time you’d be able to figure out where you needed to be), and while these workarounds were clever and well-conceived in many cases, there was a perfect, real solution, waiting to happen.
The real solution to all this is what we have been given in CS3: Nondestructive Smart Filters. In this new version, each filter and effect that you apply to a layer, remains live and continually re-editable, in real time, and the parameters that you adjust will all cascade down through whatever subsequent filters or effects you might have added to your layer. These are savable, movable, copy and pastable, and most importantly scalable.
Quick Selection tool & Refine Edge
A design mentor of mine once told me “Photoshop is all about the selection. You select something, and then you do something with the selection. Nothing more, nothing less. Remember that, and you’ll never go wrong using this app.” Almost 10 years later, I must say she was absolutely correct. Using Photoshop is all about “the selection.” There are more tools in Photoshop for selecting than for any other single task.
As in just about every version of Photoshop that has ever been released, CS3 has made even greater strides in the area of “making your selection” than comes to memory in recent years. The new Quick Selection Tool used in combination with the Refine Edge palette is about the most helpful and clean way of selecting the edges of an object in your image that I have ever seen. This new revised Quick Selection tool is so smooth. You basically set the parameters of your Quick Selection tool – as if it were a brush – and paint the general area of your image edges (like trying to select just a kid and his soccer ball out of the photo of the big game) and Photoshop is watching what you do, and interpreting what you consider to be the general edges of what you are wanting to select and it figures out what’s kid and ball and what’s grass and goal posts and sky and crowd and selects just what you want it to. It’s VERY fast and clean. Then, you can invoke the Refine Edge palette, and you have seemingly infinite control over exactly how the edges of that selection behave. Check out the palette to the right to get an idea of what you could do to “refine” that edge. With radius, feathering, smoothing, and various display settings, I believe this new combo will cut down on my masking and selecting time in a quantifiable way.
Photomerge with advanced alignment and blending
Ever tried to stitch together a series of images that you took, that you intended to “put together” into a panorama? Even with some of the stand alone tools that have been available over the years—even those for doing quicktime VR’s—are clunky and difficult to use – with mixed results at times. I have always wanted something built into Photoshop to let me do these “photo merges” – I never expected that Photoshop would actually be able to automatically do it for me. This feature floored me. The technologies involved in my number four choice “Automatic layer alignment and blending” are at work here in this feature as well, and the new auto layer alignment features in CS3 are far-reaching and crop up again and again in different areas of the application. It’s really one of the revolutionary things about this new version.
All of the things that have made making panoramas a difficult task in the past are all done automatically. The primary among these being 1. those times when you have to actually distort, rotate, skew or transform one of your elements because the perspective is screwy, 2. those times when the sun or lighting or a window made the white balance, color space or over all wash of brightness and contrast different from one image to the next (especially when doing 360’s) and of course 3. actually finding and aligning those overlapping areas of consecutive elements. Photoshop CS3 does these all for you and with surprisingly amazing results. It’s not just about the typical “panorama” either… I saw a demo of someone standing “too close” to a building, and taking pictures zoomed all the way out, of the front door, windows and window-boxes, front brick walk way, tilting upward and taking a picture of the balcony and roof line of the second floor – in other words, many elements that were WAY out of whack in terms of perspective, lighting and color space, and these 4 or 5 images were distorted, tweaked, rotated, matched, blended, lighting and color density matched… and I was amazed in like 5 seconds, there was this “wide angle” almost “fisheye” photomerge of the front of the building, from brick walkway to roof-line, and it looked incredible.
Automatic layer alignment and blending
Another powerful application of this new alignment and blending technology is with a series or stack of images of the same subject. Let’s say you wanted to take a picture of a statue in a park somewhere, or a huge fountain, or the front of a monument or building. There are always people walking through the frame – if you can’t close down the area and still need a picture of the statue, in the park, in it’s beautiful setting, but with no people or birds or random elements – what are you to do? In the past, it was a painstaking process of shooting a bunch of images, selecting the “closest” one to your vision of a nice, clean, tourist-less frame, and begin the hours and hours of painting, cloning, healing, brushing etc., to remove all of your “randoms.” There are artists who are very good at this process, but I’m fairly certain they would agree that if there was a way to not have to spend all that time, they’d take it. Well, it’s here. Photoshop CS3 can take your stack of images and by analyzing all of them, figure out which things are permanent (things that appear in all the images like that building in the distance, the big tree, the sidewalk, and which parts of the image are obscured in one of the frames but not all of them, are healed automatically by borrowing pixels from other images in the stack and building an advanced composite of all the images and doing 90% or more of the work for you. There’s even a set of “fuzziness” sliders letting you say “eleminate things that are in X% of the images in the stack or less.” This is so impressive to see in action. You have to try it on some of your own images. It’s really hard to believe that it’s this easy to do this sort of process now. This is one of those new areas that I’m sure we’ll see artists finding incredibly creative ways to utilize this feature. Again, this one floored me when I first saw it.
Vanishing Point with adjustable angle
One of the most powerful new features of Adobe CS2 was the vanishing point feature. One limitation it had was that you only had one set of right angles to work with in the vanishing point interface. Adobe took it one exponential step further by adding multiple, adjustable angle perspective planes to this vanishing point feature. What this enables you to do is copy, paste and clone in far more complex image planes than just the “clone parts of a building in perspective” job that the first iteration of this feature offered (impressive and powerful, but not very flexible). One of the big examples Adobe is pushing with this feature is to simulate 3D packaging and work on multiple planes at various angles in the same image. Like an open box for a new product, or even for experimenting with your final package art by seeing it in its real-world context. Again I think this feature has so many far reaching implications for inventors, prototypers, 3D modelers, visual effects artists… and can give Photoshop artists the ability to render full blown mockups of product packaging art for clients in a whole new way – getting us to sign-off, green-light and on to the next project at hand much more quickly. I like that a lot.
There are numerous new features in the application, especially when you dig down deep into the Photoshop Extended editions (sounds like a Peter Jackson DVD…) and as the week progresses here, I’d like to look into some of what PsCS3 Extended has to offer. The versions of PsCS3 that are available are the Film & Video, Medical & Science, AEC (Architecture, Engineering & Construction), and Manufacturing editions.
Twitter
