Almost Forgot

It's Friday again. Merry Weekend!

Afternoon Sun

Green Eyed Girl

Color Me Confused

I've had to give myself a crash course in color management for digital photography. Since I got the fancy new camera, I decided to take advantage of shooting in RAW format. I won't bore you with the technical details of why the RAW format is better. You can google it if you are curious. Anyway, the RAW images are "processed", the digital version of developing film, and then the results are saved into other formats. Things were going pretty well at first. Got some good images, prettied them up in the camera software, then finished them in Photoshop Elements. Everything looked great at the time. However, all of this was done on the desktop Mac, and Macs have had built-in color management for a long time. So imagine my horror when I looked at my Flickr photostream on a PC - and the images that looked so wonderful on the Mac were garishly oversaturated on the Windows browsers. And looked like they were taken with a magenta filter. Crap!

After several days of painful research and experimentation, I finally have a workflow that keeps the images looking roughly the same on all platforms. I now know way more than I wanted to know about ICC profiles, monitor calibration, color spaces, gamut, embedded color profiles, LCD monitor characteristics, gamma, color temperature, and so on. I also learned that all of my discoveries on this matter are just the tip of the iceberg. It would take years to get good at this. A lot of years. So hopefully I know just enough. No more pink and orange cats. Unless they were born that way.

The Moxy photo below is one of the photos I had to correct. Mac users will see no difference, but PC users should now see a photo with far more realistic colors.

Island Dreams

The island trip was nice, but too short. Seeing family was nicer, and now I am back home and PDM's family is here for the holiday.

It was overcast and gray the whole time on Saint Simons Island. I only took a few photographs. I liked this one of the trees. Spanish moss is a parasite, but it is pretty. This was taken at Fort Frederica.

Happy Thanksgiving, y'all.

It was the shirt.

What a night! Tech won (The real Tech, not that polytechnic school from Virginny). It was the first time we've beat a top-five team at home since 1962. Coach Paul Johnson is a chessmaster. I think we've got ourselves another Bobby Dodd, folks. And I've got myself a lucky hoodie!

Immediately after the game ended, the students swarmed the field. We saw them carrying the goalposts down Yellow Jacket Alley about half an hour later, and I hear they ended up on the university president's front lawn.

Pick a tree!

A fun feline pastime. Here, Zima will demonstrate.

Relax, it's Friday.

The World Is His Litterbox

He just doesn't know it yet.

We've started letting Silvio outside when we are home to supervise. He hasn't figured out that he can pee wherever he wants to when he is outside. Today, he was outside for a while, and then promptly peed on the porch when I let him back in. *sigh* Maybe we should have him follow Zima around. She definitely prefers nature's litterbox.

I haven't been around the internets much due to the impending exam. It's all eat, sleep, work, study. I'm taking the last week of May off, so I can cut out the work part and study full time. May 31. Seventeen days.

Moxy Down Under

Boredom + Photoshop =

Happy Friday, everyone.

Demon Spawn

Looks cute, doesn't he?

Electric Kitty Cat

After yesterday's post, you knew today's Friday cat pic would be heavily photoshopped, right? This photo was my very first experiment with PSE, using the "magic extractor" tool to remove the cluttered background, followed by the addition of a radial blur and a pretty colored background. Zima looks radiant, doesn't she? Or maybe just radioactive...

Photoshopaholic!

Hello, my name is Fermicat, and I am a photoshopaholic.

PDM got me Photoshop Elements 6.0 for Mac as a birthday gift. Here it is just a few days later and I am already addicted to messing with my digital photos. I lusted after this program for months. Digital photography is fun, and I wanted to take it to the next level: creative art (or pure crap, depending on your perspective). Not only do I find lots of stuff in my photos to fix (limitations due to both camera and photographer), I keep seeing really interesting, unnatural special effects on other people's Flickr photos that look very cool. I want!

So much to try... old fashioned hand tinted look, Orton effect, fake HDR, fake LOMO, removing clutter from photos, mixing objects from different shots, or creating a totally unique effect. While experimenting with these special effects, I am also trying to learn how to use Photoshop Elements. I know enough to be dangerous. There are probably better ways to do what I am doing, but learning by trying things is not a bad way to go.

This distraction is not good for my study plans. Another downside is that I am monopolizing PDM's Mac. Oh well. The newness will wear off soon and things will calm down. In the meantime I am having a blast taking ordinary photographs and making them into something special.

The Varsity street scene at the top of this post is my first attempt at the LOMO technique. It took me a couple of hours of adjusting to achieve. The boring photo I started with can be viewed here. The one below combines the Orton effect with fake hand tinting to create a dreamy, ethereal feel. I made a Flickr set to showcase my creations. There are several Orton photos in there, some hand tinted shots, and an attempt to recreate a vintage postcard type of look.