Wednesday, May 25th
Sharpening with an Edge Mask - or
Creating an Edge Mask in Photoshop
category: digital photography and image editing
If the image to be sharpened is noisy or grainy, create an edge mask for sharpening that, when inverted, acts as a perfect mask for using the Gaussian Blur or Median filters to clean up the noise in smooth areas without softening the edges.
Duplicate the channel with the most detail and the least noise. This will probably be the green channel. Rename the copied channel Edge Mask. Now choose Filter, Stylize, and then Find Edges. Your image window should now be edges in black against a dirty white background.
He said on 05.25.05 @ 03:19 PM CST [entry continued] on printer friendly page
Friday, May 20th
Blue Screen of Death - or
Windows Operating System Errors
category: software
All Windows (NT flavors) users are familiar with the blue screen of death. I was surprised to find it listed as a technical term at www.searchwin2000.com, a computer geek website. No one is immune from its dreadful appearance. And no one seems to know exactly when or why it will appear.
The one reliable thing about the blue screen of death, affectionately known as b-sod, is that it arrives at the worst possible moment. You’ve been working like a dog on something, you’re in the middle of a save or compile, and the damn machine locks up. According to one explanation, "The blue screen may include some hexadecimal values from a core dump that may help determine what caused the crash." And what is a core dump, you might ask. A core dump is a replication of what is contained in RAM, random access memory, at a given moment. A core dump might hint at what application or combination of applications brought forth the Blue Screen of Death, but what good will that you do? Knowing what caused B-SOD will not prevent it from happening again.
She said on 05.20.05 @ 01:13 PM CST [entry continued] on printer friendly page
Tuesday, May 17th
Not Just Black and White - or
Non-destructive Dodge and Burn in Photoshop
category: digital photography and image editing
Photoshop's Dodge and Burn tools are great for cleaning up the delicate edges of masks. Set the Dodge tool to Highlights in Range, and it will only lighten the light side of the edge. Set the Burn tool to Shadows in Range, and it will only darken the dark side of the edge. The only other setting for the Dodge and Burn tools is Exposure, which works like opacity in a paintbrush. Set the Exposure higher if your edges are already close to black and white and to lower when they are shades of gray and just go over them a few times. You can toggle between Dodge and Burn with the Alt key and change the size of your brush with the bracket keys.
He said on 05.17.05 @ 12:48 PM CST [entry continued] on printer friendly page
Friday, May 13th
Red Screen of Death - or
Soon to be Known as R-SOD
category: software
We need something new from Microsoft, don't we. We had a handle on some of the reasons that caused us to see the dreaded BSOD, Blue Screen of Death. To keep up from getting bored, they have come up with a Red Screen of Death as a portion of the new Longhorn operating system they are testing, allegedly due out in 2006.
It's about time Microsoft gave us something new. Too bad it's something no one wants. RSOD errors are supposed to be even worse than BSOD erros.
Here's a little more on the story.
She said on 05.13.05 @ 10:13 PM CST [entry page] is printer friendly
Wednesday, May 11th
Working with Curves in RGB - or
Photoshop Curves to make Adjustments to Tone in RGB
category: digital photography and image editing
You can do things to tone with Curves in one adjustment that would take several Levels adjustments with masks to accomplish, but first you have to realize that Curves doesn't really work in RGB, and what to do about it.
He said on 05.11.05 @ 01:04 PM CST [entry continued] on printer friendly page
Tuesday, May 3rd
The Hairy Thing - or
Fuzzy Search
category: writing
Fuzzy searching is the search characteristic used by Google and Yahoo that allows the search results to pose the question _Did you mean prairie_ when you enter the search term prarie. As a person with a humanities background, I appreciate the latitude offered by a term and concept such as fuzzy search. It's a bit like lagniappe, one of the greatest words ever. But let's save that one for another day.
She said on 05.03.05 @ 04:27 PM CST [entry page] is printer friendly
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