Confessions of a Keytarist

Recently, I’ve been taking quite a few car photographs, and although I was pleased with the overall quality of the shots, they didn’t seem to “blast” of the page like those in the glossy mags.
After a bit of studying perhaps the most famous of them all, Top Gear, I decided to see if I could replicate the processing done on their images with mine.

I played around in Photoshop for quite a bit before settling on the process I describe below. I’m pretty pleased with the outcome, so I thought it worthy of inclusion on this blog. Hopefully some of you will find it useful too!

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I needed to get a rowcount for a particular table within a customers database today, so I fired off my normal query:

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SELECT COUNT(1) 
FROM < <TABLENAME>>

And I got my row count back (incdidently, it was just over 325,000), but it was taking almost 10 seconds to return. Not Good!.
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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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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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