Confessions of a Keytarist

Firstly, I couldn’t come up with a “snappy” title for this post, so went with the above. I guess I’m too busy to be even marginally creative!

I have recently been working with a multiple web project solution in Visual Studio. For ages, I’ve been switching between each web project by stopping debugging, setting the other as the start up project, and then starting debugging again. As you can imagine, this makes testing interoperability between the two quite a drag.

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I cooked some Indian cuisine for a few friends last night and they were enquiring how I cooked the pilau rice that accompanied the main dishes.
I promised to write out the recipe; so here it is!

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Warning: rant ahead!

I’m now the sole developer working on arguably one of the largest projects for our company, and things are going well. However, I keep falling into traps and pitfalls created by one of the projects last programmers.

One of his “favourite” tricks seems to be creating a business layer method that populates an object based on data retrieved from a database. Nothing odd there.. but it’s when you have the need to re-use one of his functions that you end up falling right into his carefully seeded trap!

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Following on nicely from the last post, I have another quick trick I often use to give some of my more “meh” photos a bit more “yeh”.

We’ll start with the same photo as before:

As before, the image appears quite “flat” and lifeless. We can try and fix this with a very quick and (usually) efficient contrast tweak using a “soft light” layer.

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Time for another Photoshop trick; this time it’s a very quick and easy one that can add that little bit extra to a photo.

So, first of all we need an image to work with. Here’s one of my little cousin:

As you can see, the image appears very “flat”.  I know it’s not exactly a fantastic photo to begin with, especially as it’s from a 1mp camera phone, but it’s good enough to demonstrate this trick! Continue reading

Now that their  once-prodigious and heralded safe haven “The Pirate Bay” is effectively suffering a hiatus whilst it’s previous captains appeal against their guilty trial verdict, it seems some of the users have started pillaging their old home and starting up their own ports of call on the internet’s high seas.

There were plans for a company called Global Gaming Factory (GFF) to take over control of The Pirate Bay, in a 60m kronor (£3.5m) acquisition, but it looks like those plans may have fallen through as GFF haven’t (so far) proved they actually HAVE 60m kronor.

Earlier this week, one anonymous user posted a web-rip of The Pirate Bay, including all 900,000 torrents,  back on the site as a single 21GB torrent download. He (or she) stated “If the TPB deal disappoints us, we can just put it up again”.

However, various other users have already started “clones” of The Pirate Bay, using the massive torrent database download.
Sites such as http://www.btarena.net/ have already experienced overwhelming demand as the pirates set sail from their old bay in search of new homes…

This post is a continuation of the second histogram post entitled “The Highs and lows”.

Another important thing a histogram does is describe contrast within your images. According to Wikipedia:

Contrast is the difference in visual properties that makes an object (or its representation in an image) distinguishable from other objects and the background.

Or, in more simplistic terms, Contrast is a measure of the difference in brightness between the light and dark areas of your photographs.
Images with histograms that have broad tonal ranges have a significant, or “high” contrast, whereas images with histograms that have narrow tonal ranges may appear dull or flat and are known as “low” contrast.

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This post is a continuation of the first histogram post entitled “Getting Toned”.

In the last article, we discussed the basics of what a histogram is, what it represents and how it is generated. What we didn’t cover is why they’re important to us digital photographers. That’s where this post comes in!

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A colleague of mine has been taking digital photographs for a while, and whilst his images are usually of a high standard to begin with, he’s beginning to use Adobe Photoshop to help bring out the absolute best in his photography.

The only crux is he’s never really used it and has asked for a bit of help.
To that end, I’ve decided to include a few tutorials in my blog to give him a bit of a head start into learning the dark art that is Photoshop!

The first tutorial I was planning to write up was how to use the level’s tool to make those little tweaks to the image brightness values that can really improve an image. However, as my colleague didn’t quite understand what we were doing and what the histogram represented, I thought it best to actually start with explaining what the histogram actually is…

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A colleague came to me today asking if I knew of any way to remove the close button from a windows form, but still show the minimize and maximize buttons.

On the face of it, it sounded like an easy answer. I knew you could disable both the minimize and maximize buttons very easily from within the Visual Studio GUI – so surely there’s an option for the third button; the close button?
Actually, no. Whilst you can remove all three buttons in one go (changing the setting “ControlBox” to false.) and as previously mentioned, you can disable the maximize and minimize buttons (“MaximizeBox” and “MinimizeBox” settings respectively), there is no setting to directly control the Close button.

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