quick and dirty cross process

All you need is curves, bra da da da dah.

Put some CYAN in the shadows:

Put some Blue in the shadows and yellow in the highlights:

You can leave the green alone (or put a little magenta in the shadows – ie remove some green like this…)

Take away some contrast:

Before:

and after:

hang on, lets make those highlights blow out a bit…

duplicate the layer and set the layer mode to screen:

Blur it a bit (or a lot)

The clever bit: Double click on the layer to bring up the layer style
See where it says “this layer”: Use the layer blend slider things and separate the shadow end (press alt whilst cliking on them). This create a soft falloff, and means that the blurring is only applied to the highlights.

outlook8

outlook9

Curves is all you need.

a visual guide to using AUTOPANO to create painting stiches

When 18MP isn’t enough. Take 4 or 6 images of your artwork and get AUTOPANO to stitch them together:

This technique is designed for when the camera does not move – ie you move the painting and keep the plane constant.

The only change I would make is the final slide: set the focal length to 1000mm to get no distortion of the final render.

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Whose knicked your stuff?

Another tool every photographer should have in their arsenal:
http://www.tineye.com/

Reverse image search engine – you enter your image, it returns all the sites that are using it. I tried it on an image I had on the stock xchange for a while, and found it (albeit horribly mutilated) in 6 locations.

New computer time: an idiots guide

Written for idiots by an idiot.

I never learn that those ten minute jobs are rarely so. I’ll expand this post later but here’s the last 2 days in a nutshell, and a list of resources for anyone setting up a similar system (or indeed for me for when I have to do it all again)

Skip this if you have a life *********
The system is:
Asus p6td deluxe – a variation on the p6t line that have had several generations to iron out the kinks. I got this board because there were several quality improvements but alas, failed to notice that Asus had removed 2 sata ports. In fact discovered since that Asus does this a lot. They also had removed the SAS ports (meh) and the floppy port (which was a big meh until the excitement of later)
12gb OCZ CL7 ram, which didn’t arrive so currently on 3g geil ho hum
intel x25 SSD 8-gb
300gb WD raptor (which I’ll use if the 80gb starts running out of space and for the print spool file and PS scratch disk)
4x WD green 1.5tb drives in raid 10. Yes they’re green and slow, but I had 3 already so I only needed one more to make the raid set. If I did it again I would’ve forked out for the blacks.
A huge asus graphics card, Nvidea GTX275
**********

And we’re back

I wont tell you what I did wrong, I’ll just summarise what I learnt:

Setting up raid. Never done this before: “how hard could it be”.

Read quickly and weep:
http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/269867-31-configure-asus-lone-sata-raid#t2047541

now before you get stuck in you’ll have to TLER your WD drives first. IF you have NO idea what that means, well the green blue and black drives are apparently not meant for raid arrays, but WD provides a tool that no one is supposed to have access to unless you ask nicely but isn’t difficult to find.

You create a bootable floppy, stick the WD utility on it and off you go. Except if you don’t have a floppy. In which case read this:
http://shifteightgeneration.com/content/wdtler-fix-tler-setting-wd-desktop-hard-drives

Read it anyway even if you do it tells you how to use the WD TLER utility.

Caveat: a few steps are wrongish – here’s the corrections:
5: Open up a command prompt and type cd C:ubcd411toolsubcd2iso

also see the “Some problems” post on that page.

If you get a crash on running tlerscan. then have a look at this:
http://forums.whirlpool.net.au/forum-replies.cfm?t=1363969

Summary: put your SSD on sata 1 and do one disk at a time (yawn).

Now you can go back to this:
http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/269867-31-configure-asus-lone-sata-raid#t2047541
and do the step-by-step

notes:
4: ^I is ctrl-I
Select option 1, then tab down though each option (ie choose your raid type – 10 in my case) then down to select drives. This is where you pick which drives will be in the raid – letting you use the SSD as the boot drive and not part of the raid.

Don’t be a big smartypants and install your OS first. You’ll find it wont work and you’ll have to re-install.
If you do have to reinstall don’t do what I did and just install it over the top. Do a secure erase first.
http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=3531&p=11

OK, where do you get secure erase from? And how to get it to work? Haven’t got that far yet, will update when I know.

So install your OS, pop you motherboard driver disk in and install everything (I installed the raid driver first in case a reboot for something else made it go tits-up).
Go into computer management > storage and you should see your raid. Initialise it as GBT, not MBR. (MBR cant handle partitions greater than 2TB, but you can only boot from an MBR). If this doesn’t make any sense and your setup is like mine you’ll be booting from the SSD, keep the raid as one great big drive, choose GBT, and set the cluster size to 32kb. (I’ve got lots of big files so that makes sense).

No You’ll need to do things to your OS to make the SSD run sweetly, and apparently help it live longer. Although the rate these things are developing I can’t imagine you’ll be still using it in 4 years time. Everyone will be going: ha 80GB? Hilarious – I paid like $400 for it too. I’ve got more than that in my iwatch. Unless of course the global economy has finally collapsed taking civilisation with it, in which case this is as good as it got before we end of the age of enlightenment and we all started eating each other. (Shudder)
read this:
http://forums.overclockers.co.uk/showthread.php?t=18073901

I haven’t done any of these yet, I’ll report back when I have, I’ll probably only do 3 or 4. Page file is staying on the ssd, for example.

crikey what a palaver!

I have saved all of the pages listed here locally, so if any links break, let me know

VSO image resizer

I bitch and moan enough about crappy software, I thought I should redress the balance and give a quick woot for this small and reasonably friendly little application.

EVERY PHOTOGRAPHER SHOULD HAVE IT!

Its a context-menu app – allowing you to right click on a photo, several photos, or photos and folders and resize and reformat virtually any image file. What makes it shine is its support for 8 and 16 bit Photoshop files, reading the composite data – which means its massively quicker than bridge/photoshop because it doesn’t have to load the whole file. You can save in any format, and add a simple watermark with text, or with an image file. There is a little learning curve, but you can also use it out of the box with presets. I just resized 20 or so huge jpegs (20mb files = about 8000×6000px) added watermark in under a minute.

Pros: Small footprint, quick, simple and powerful (a rare and wonderful thing), nothing out there quite like it.
Cons:Struggles with CMYK files

Its free, with a nag. PC only.

http://www.vso-software.fr/products/image_resizer/

she’s here!

Just before 10 pm,  we were off to bed and Elektra said that things were a bit different down there. “Are we having a baby?” I ask. “maybe” she replies.

I think “crap if its anything like last time I better knock out that work thats due on Thursday!” When I get off the computer Elektras on the phone to the midwife and  making “we’re having a baby” noises. She sends me off to bed, then phones me at about midnight when the contractions are about “6 mins apart”.  Although as soon as she stands up I realise they’re not 6 mins apart and I get visions of birthing on the pacific highway.  Run around gathering the essentials: camera, bananas, chocolate. Bundle into car and head off  (stopping only to turn our bin through 180 – the garbos wont collect it otherwise – part of me thinking that I must’ve done this before).  Drive as quickly but smoothly as possible to Coffs, almost go via airport (was on Auto Pilot Elektra in mid contraction “where are you going?!!”) and do the seemingly interminable walk to the maternity unit. Elektras having contractions every 3 minutes in the car, and that stays pretty much the same for the next 4 hours.

Our midwife was Bronwyn – settles us in I start running a bath, where Elektra stays also more or less for the next 4 hours. Its about 1am and we know Zahira and Lyn (our midwife) are on their way – they’re both there by 2.

For Elektra there follows several hours of what you could describe as “some discomfort” (but only if you are brave, foolish or owner of loud voice and fast legs).   Despite the screaming, groaning and expletives Elektra keeps her sense of humour dry: (middle of contraction: “you’ve got to get a vasectomy”;  to honor the cliche:  “this is your fault you bastard”; on being informed the midwife’s enormous rubber glove is used by vets: a deadpan “moo”).

She moves round in the bath a few times, after a protracted session on her knees she turns over and – oh my god – theres half a head poking out between her legs – and not a squashy cone head either, a perfectly round (and big!) head with lots of hair. On her back now but still in the bath theres “more discomfort” as the baby moves about trying to get shoulder out.  One more big push – from both mother and baby seemingly and out she comes, gurgling and crying

Off to visit now will finish up later…

misery session

from last year but recently processed a whole bunch
Enjoy

mg 0438 edit 640×480

mg 0441 2 1 55×55 flat 640×480

mg 0441 edit 2 640×480

mg 0444 640×480

mg 0286 edit 640×480

mg 0427 edit 640×480

mg 0428 edit 640×480

mg 0431 edit 640×480

Ironically only ever received criticism for any of my photos with this model (Cath) as my subject!  This session for “taking advantage” of someones grief, and for “child abuse” for the lead image on www.gethincoles.com

the comped shots

He’s not at all scary, by the way

mg 4744 edit

mg 4746

mg 4749 edit 2

mg 4749 edit

mg 4754 edit

mg 4756 edit 2

…and the black and white version

portrait lit by sparklers and leds

This was an experiment – been doing some light painting stuff with Alex (that’s him down there), had an idea to do some portraits lit with sparklers and leds. Required him to sit very still, and comped in a flash exposure of his features. Never intended to do a finished piece from these tests, but as the deadline for the Bellingen Art Prize neared, ran out of time. Based on each image, didn’t think it was going to work – but started to come alive as I played with the layers and started painting on masks. I love it, plan to do a series, but I’ll have to see if I still like it next week….

heres a detail

and a bigger detail

Each long exposure was about 30 seconds.  Alex is quite hairy so waving a sparkler round his head was exciting!