The Blues

Cripes!

I sat down the other night to work on some of my backlog of photos that I want to Photoshop and upload to flickr, maybe use on my blog.

And I noticed that the background of my blog was on odd shade of green. I brought up my flickr page and noticed the white background was kind of a cyan... hmmm... and wasn't the whole screen just a little too bright?

It dawned on me that every time one of my toddlers wanders off lately, I can usually find him in the office, standing on the desk chair, sprawled precariously across the desk, clicking buttons on the mouse, the keyboard, AND the monitor! I think perhaps they had gotten into the gamma settings and the monitor's color balance!

I don't know much about calibrating your monitor, so I read up online about it for awhile and then gave it a go... which produced some very dark, very unattractive results on my monitor. I read up some more on some other pages, and tried again. This time better results but I ended up manually balancing the colors against a test photo (which is supposed to be perfectly color-balanced) that I downloaded. I got it to look just perfect and was finally happy.

That's when I went back to my flickr account and much to my horror saw that most of my photos looked like a freak show of super-saturated color. Granted, I like to saturate my photos but LORDY! What a mess.

I spun through some of flickr's finest photos to make sure it wasn't still my monitor, and I found that they all looked fantastic, so I realized that I had been color-balancing all my photos to very incorrect monitor settings for awhile now.

And I have a memory of writing almost this identical blog post a few months ago... Hmmm...

Maybe I should go and write down these new settings before I attempt to color balance another photo.

Yeah.

Gonna get right on that.

Hawaiian Redux: Grass Skirts and Fire Dancers

Getting bored of the Hawaii Travelogue yet? Well, I am getting close to done. Then it will be back to adorable pictures of the kids and the mundanities of my life. Is that a word? Mundanities?

Anyway, on with the luau!

This was the stage overlooking the sea. That's the M.C. up there.


We were sitting pretty much front row center, at his feet. If you ever go to the luau at the Royal Kona Resort, DO pay the extra five bucks to get VIP treatment. Its worth it. We ate first, too.

Also, at the bar with the long line? Tell them you are getting drinks for your party and get enough for each of you to have three. That way, you don't have to stand in that crazy line again.


Check this out. Can you say Hot Foot?


I have said from time to time, after eating Mexican food, that my mouth was on fire. But it wasn't really. Not like this:



And because I know there are men out there who don't want to see shot after shot of "Mr. Abs of Steel" (Hi, DAD!), let's bring on one of the ladies!

Dang, she's pretty!

These next folks don't look too bad, either, but maybe its just the good Photoshopping job that was done on the picture.

Although, don't go congratulating me on the great Photoshop job on all these photos. I have a new apprentice and he is doing a great job!

My son, Luka, has been mastering layers and color balancing this week and is really coming along nicely on his sharpening skills, too!

As long as I keep him plied with coffee, he should make it through my unshopped photo catalog by next week!

Excuses and a Whole 'Nuther Distraction

Didja miss me?

Yeah, yeah, I know. It’s been forever since I posted, and the last thing people want to read after a dry spell is a bunch of excuses. But I have some good ones, I DO!!

First off, my parents came and visited for 10 days. We did a whirlwind of touristy activities, giving San Diego a run for her money. Luckily, we loaded the big ticket items at the front end of the trip; what with the sporadic rains we had leading up to this weekend’s big storms.

I usually do my blogging at night after everyone goes to bed, but the computer area shares space with the guest-sleeping area here, and while I felt free to read nearby sleeping folk at night, rapping at the keyboard seemed right out. So, posting was kept to a minimum.

And then there is the other thing that has consumed me lately…

…my new mistress! (Can a straight girl have a mistress?)

Actually its more than one thing I have fallen deeply for, so maybe “my new playgroup” is a more accurate metaphor!

I speak of my love for all things digital that have come into my life lately… I have been set up by generous gifts all around… my new Canon Digital Rebel XTi, my super-narrow depth of field lens that makes me feel all squishy inside, and my update to the latest Photoshop combined with the super-awesome Lightroom program which is a database for professional photographers (which I am not) to help them get organized (which I try to be) and manage their “workflow” (a fun new term I learned while trying to learn how to work the damned thing).

Lightroom absolutely rocks my socks off. It imports photos, renames them to however I have set it up, moves them to where I want them to live, does simple and more than simple processing of one or whole sets of pics at the same time, allows you to flag pictures as “picks” or as “rejected” or rate them by numbers of stars, or by color, allows you to imprint metadata (copywrite info, my phone number, etc) on each photo, set up sets of photos, allowing one photo to be in more than one collection at a time without having to make a copy of it, arranges slide shows, AND!! AND!!! I got a plugin which allows me to send a photo to my flickr site with one click!

It basically rocks.

Oh, I said that, didn’t I?

Did I mention, though, that it rocks?

But the problem is that it is a fairly complex program and is not all that intuitive. So with much of my free time, I have been watching video tutorials and reading Lightroom blogs, and trying to find answers to my questions.

And this all went on while I was wandering all over San Diego, taking a million different photos with my new camera and lens, creating a huge backlog of photos which I didn’t want to import until I had a new system in place, folders and hierarchies set up, and such, in which to receive and welcome my new digital creations!!

And so, instead of posting all the glorious fun we have been having, I have been reading technical drivel.

But wait! All is not lost!

The folders are now in place! The perfect naming scheme has been devised! The doors have been thrown wide open and the red ribbon has been cut!!

Whoo-hoo!!! NO MORE WAITING!!

Glorious Blog Posts with New Fantastical Images, HERE I COME!!!

Huh?



What’s that?

Oh Lordy, is it really THAT time of year already!??

OOOH, its Bloggy Giveaway Time, baby!! And you know what that means, don’t ya?

YEAH!

It’s ANOTHER week of not making any new blog posts because I am spending every free moment I have entering the literally HUNDREDS of giveaways held by bloggers around the blogosphere!

So, um, bear with me one more week, and I will be back to my regularly scheduled blogging, with all those fascinating updates about our lives that you guys live for. And I might even have a giveaway of my very own!! So stand by me. I shall return.

I swear.

Pinky swear!

Ch-Ch-Ch-Ch-Changes!!

Noah went off to day camp for the first time today, and the twins and I fell roughly back into our old schedule.

For the first time since before Christmas, I ventured out in the morning, picking up some tools so that I can do some jewelry making I have been wanting to try. The boys fell asleep on the way to the grocery store. Falling asleep in the car for even a few minutes can ruin nap time for us, so I turned toward home instead.

As suspected, moving them into their beds was not so easy, and Luka began jumping and shouting (quite gleefully). Experience told me to ignore him, and he fell asleep after an hour. Ethan, on the other hand, fell asleep quickly but woke way too early. So, while I didn't have the child-free time I have been craving for a couple weeks, I did get to cuddle with Ethan on the bed, trying to get him back to sleep, but instead giggling and tickling.

I don't get to do that much with my boys. Noah is not much of a cuddler, and maybe because they are boys, or twins, or both... our house is usually to chaotic to lay cuddled with Mama on the couch. So this was a very sweet and special little time for Ethan and I.

I had started working on a new blog header during the short time they were both down, and Ethan allowed me to finish it while he played on my lap and around my legs on the floor. I was kind of afraid to change it. Not sure why. I think it looks good, but my profile pic has the old picture of Noah giving me dandelions. I kept the dandelion theme.

Maybe I need to go take Luka out looking for dandelions. Equal time for everyone, you know.

What do you think of the new header?? Be honest.

No, really.

New Blog Header! YAY!

So, I went and fixed my blog header finally! And it was such an easy fix! But I also wanted to play around with my new updated Photoshop, so I went over the old picture and tried to spruce it up a little bit.

What do you think?

I see it really needs to be redone with a higher resolution. It's a bit grainy. Actually, I may go back and just redo it completely; try to make it look more professional. But I am not known for my design skills.

We shall see.

But it's certainly better than it was the last few days! Whew!!!

Fun Monday: A Cop-Out?

( UPDATE: It appears that my Fun Monday good deed as really hurt the feelings of one of the original participants. She has decided to quit Fun Monday because of it! I feel just awful. I posted an apology in the comments of this post, as well as on her site. Please read.)

Well, I decided it was time for me to join in with the Fun Monday crew, blogging about whatever the assigned topic was. They took last Monday off, it being a holiday and all, and it was announced that in the next two weeks (from the last post) that our assignment was to do a good deed.

Nikki, our host this week, gave us this assignment:

Have you ever had someone out of the goodness of their heart do something for
you without anything asked in return? Offered you money when you needed it the
most? Helped you change a flat tire in the pouring rain or even just simply held
the door open for you when you had your hands full? For Monday, September
10th, we are challenged with doing a good deed.

Two weeks? Aw, heck... I had lotsa time! But then, I found myself dealing with moving Noah into a new school, and the usual staying home with twin toddlers during the week. And weekends are fast and furious around here... so the days slipped by.

I spend a lot of time in my own home, and rarely get much chance to see other people much less do good deeds for them. I had thought of doing this awesome Random Act of Kindness I read about over at Wannabe Hippie's site, which she found at Jen Lemen's site. Its such a cool idea... go ahead, read about it, I will wait. Then come back...

...I even bought post-it notes and stuck them in my purse, made a list of cool things to write. But I never found myself in a public restroom after that preparation. I still plan to do that sometime, though.

So, being the homebody I am, I am kind of using this as a cop-out, but my good deed is for all my fellow Fun Monday participants. I sat down with my photoshop (mmmm, photoshop) and made us all a new cool logo!! Its free for anyone to snag from my post, up there at the top, or I also posted it to my flickr site. I am not sure who made the original green logo, and I mean NO offense to that person, but it was just too tiny for me, and needed a little Oooomph! And some FUN! So, use whichever one you want, or none as some are inclined to do.

But enjoy! Happy Fun Monday!

And to my regular readers (Hi Mom! Hi Vera!) I plan to write something about the family real soon! Really! More horrific details of life with a dare-devil toddler. Stay tuned...

Go here to see more Fun Monday posts by fellow participants. Oh, and ps: I assume you can resize the big version, but just in case, here is a smaller version of the logo, if you want that.

Technical Difficulties

We have been having some computer problems lately.

My beloved Adobe Photoshop crashed for some reason and then I found that my installation discs no longer would work. Probably scratched. Then, our main computer started to crash too, and so we switched to the laptop for a good long time. I was left with Adobe Elements with which to play with and color-balance my photos.

Elements is a pretty good program with a lot of short cuts that work very nicely to do some adjustments you do manually in Photoshop. It took some getting used to, but in the end I liked it.

But we just brought down our OTHER, other computer from Michael’s mom’s house and while we are on our third hard drive in as many months, we are back to our usual monitor screen.

THE PROBLEM is that while looking back on the photos I retouched and color-balanced while we used the laptop, I see that many of them are way off color, and often horribly over-saturated! Now, I often like to bump the saturation a bit, especially for online use, but that photo down there of Vera and me looks like someone spilled Kool-Aid and Jell-O all over it! I am going to have to go back and re-do that.

But also, over at Mama Says Om, they chose my picture of the twins sweeping to be representative of the weekly theme, "responsibility", and eeeeewwwww, now that I see it on my good monitor, it is a nasty fluorescent yellow. Yuk.

Well, I am thrilled to find that this new (old) hard drive HAS a working version of Photoshop on it, and I am back to my good monitor, so I hope you will forgive the overly-Technicolor pictures of old, and find that my work is looking a little nicer, soon.

I leave you with this overly-contrasty but color-balanced self-portrait of a giddy Michael and I on our little vacation at the Sheraton.

Tilt-Shift Photography

Awhile back, while wandering through random photos on flickr.com, I came across a really cool photo process called tilt-shift. It was discovered a LONG time back when camera lenses were mounted on a bellows, and if the bellows was tilted a bit, large chunks of the photo would go out of focus and an interesting effect would happen: the rest of the photograph would appear to resemble a model, a little miniature version of the real thing.

I can’t explain it as well as I can just show you some examples. There are a group of these tilt-shift photos here and here. This one is awesome! And here is a before and after.

To get this effect nowadays (since most people do not have movable bellows cameras) people have gone so far as to mount their regular lens on a flexible rubber mount between the lens and the camera. I even saw one person had made a mock-up with a toilet plunger.

Well, leave it to Photoshoppers to find a way to copy almost any process. It seems there are some tutorials out there in how to take a normal photo and do this effect. But these tutorials explain using the pricey new Photoshop CS, which I do not have, thank you very much.

So, knowing not a LOT changes in new versions of Photoshop, I followed along the tutorial and tweaked the process a bit. The result is not likely as good as it would have been with CS filters, but it’s really not bad!

You need to use a photo that is taken from above for the effect to work best, and also with things that would translate well to toy or model versions of the originals like buildings and cars. I didn’t have many pics that would work well, but found this one I took of the Maid of the Mist in Niagara Falls. If I am out and about with my camera, I plan on taking some shots that will be more appropriate to the process.

Pretty cool, no? Let me know if you want to know how I did it.

I can hook ya up!

My Little Computer Geek!

So, Noah was watching me on the computer, and asked if he could work with my Adobe Photoshop program!! I was color balancing some pictures, and he wanted to play with the sliders. And would you believe he set it JUST RIGHT!!?? Holy Cow!

So I showed him how to pick colors in the painting section of the program and set him up with a photo of himself to paint on. He immediately went to the color green and painted two rows of boogers streaming out of his nose!!

Well!

I soon just gave him a black canvas to work on, and left him alone. He painted this great picture of fireworks and wrote his name across the top all by himself!!

I'm so proud of my little geeky boy!!

Oooh, Photoshop... yummmm

Ooooh,

I think I just figured out how to put photos on these things. I believe there is some sort of limit to how many I can put on here, storage and all... but lets start out with a family shot. Many of you already got this pic in my last spam mail.

A secret... in this photo, everyone looked great except for me. There was another shot where I looked good and everyone else was a mess. So, finally, having gotten my adobe photoshop back, I put my good face from the one picture over the goofy face from the other picture. And voila! A picture where we all look pretty good!!

This was taken at Easter of 2007 at Mima's house.

(Mima is Michael's mom.)

Karen