compilerbitch | So that's OK, then.

So I'm healthy, not slovenly after all.

In other news, I've been learning Photoshop and Illustrator. I'm reasonably impressed with both. Previously I've used the likes of Paintshop Pro, Xara and (more recently) Gimp, but I have enough of a need to do lots of diagrams that I don't really have time to mess around. I gave up on Inkscape -- lovely though it may initially appear, it wasted me a lot of time. Grr. *slap*

OK, so here's my first attempt with for-real Photoshop:

Click here for the full resolution version -- warning -- it's huge (6000 x 5000 pixels) -- you can read the name on the back of the yacht quite clearly.

The image is not quite what it initially seems. The bottom of the scene is a panorama constructed from about 6 or 7 separate images, colour/brightness corrected and stitched together, and the sky is actually from a completely separate photograph. I had to modify one or two things very slightly -- the railing in front of

doseybat doesn't in real life stop near her, it actually runs right along the top of the concrete, but it didn't match up properly between some of the photos that made up the panorama so I painted it out. I've just invested in a reasonably decent tablet (a Trust 6" by 8" thingy with a pressure sensitive pen and a 3 button mouse), so I'm finding this a far superior interface in comparison with my usual use of a mouse or one or other of my Touchstream keyboards.

Next up will be redoing all the artwork for my paper in Illustrator, so expect one or two things to get posted here as that happens.

To follow up on another post, I've decided to go with the triangle inside the rounded rectangle. I know it lost the vote, but my co-author wants that version, and a bunch of async types in the lab also voted that way, so who am I to argue? :-)

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Wow. Impressive work with the photo!

As for the dust mites, perhaps that explains why I mysteriously developed allergies around the time I started making my bed everyday?

There is a tendency for people to subconsciously avoid allergens without being aware that they are doing it.

Anyway, that's my excuse so I'm sticking to it! :-)

Smoking in bed keeps all sorts of pathogens way as well. That's my theory and I'm sticking to it.

Gosh, that's impressive. Do you know how to get images to match up so well in Gimp? I've tried, but not had anywhere near that level of success.

In principle, there's nothing there I *couldn't* have done in Gimp, but Photoshop is just much more 'sorted' in so many ways. It has a panorama tool which is a little primitive in some ways, but it does tend to make it easy to align a number of images quickly. It makes a bad job of blending hem automatically, so I used the 'leave as layers' option which let me hand-tweak each constituent image in terms of brightness and contrast, then I hand painted the transparency masks to minimise any visible edges. Once that was complete, I merged it down to a single layer and then did some hand retouching to sort out a few problems. Finally, I added a sky image (which had to be scaled up a fair bit first) as a second layer, then hand painted its transparency mask along the horizon line of the panorama. This was quite tricky, and probably the most time consuming task. After a bit of contrast adjustment of the layers, I had a finished colour image, which was quite nice in and of itself, but I fancied doing the black & white through a deep red filter look. In photoshop, that is really easy -- I just turned off the green and blue channels, then changed the image globally to grey scale, which offered me the option to keep only the red channel, which is what I did. I may try doing a duotone at some point, which is something that Photoshop does that Gimp can't (at least directly), so maybe expect a new version soon.

Crikey. :o)

You may want to give hugin a go for panoramas as an alternative.

http://hugin.sourceforge.net/

john

So that's OK, then.

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panoramas