Elly Williams’ Weblog

I learnt how to create your own Batch Operations in Photoshop yesterday.

I used this Batch Operations Tutorial from Slightly Remarkable. It’s incredibly easy.

Open one of the pictures in Photoshop, and begin recording an Action (it’s basically the Adobe term for “macro”). You should be able to hit the “Actions” tab in your History/Actions/Tool Presets window to see the default Actions that come with Photoshop. All you have to do from there is hit the circle (record), [record the actions you want repeated], and then hit the square (stop) in the Actions window. Now that you’ve recorded the action, you can tell Photoshop to open a large number of images, run the specified Action, save the images (or copy them as changed to a new directory), and close them, all automatically.

And it means cropping 120 images takes 5 minutes instead of 5 hours.

Aristotle supposedly said “There was never a genius without a tincture of madness” (although presumably not in English). I think Andy Clarke proves that today.

There’s a bit of a story to this.

This morning, I notice amongst my Bloglines feeds a number of new posts from And All That Marlarkey. Skim reading, I learn that that’s because there’s been a major redesign over there. So I head across and have a look. In Internet Explorer (due to some unfixable mess in my default settings), I notice a high contrast black & white, fixed width design. A little bit later Jon Hicks notes in his sidelinks that the new design is liquid. As I’m fairly sure it’s not I head back. This time in Firefox…. and I am greeted by a completely different design in red, white & blue. After some initial confusion, I find out what he’s done.

Using attribute selectors is a useful way of getting the best out of browsers with good standards compliance. It is also a useful way of screening out browsers with poor CSS support (they simply ignore the selectors)…The new site makes extensive use of attribute selectors for that very reason. Not to be elitist or to discriminate, but to demonstrate what might be done for more modern browsers.

What clever things we can do with technology these days.

Following on from a couple of Fixed vs Liquid discussions last week (notably from Jeremy, Molly and Jeremy (again)) I did a quick (ish) litmus test of my own using the fantastic CSS Zen Garden.

Of the 160-something Official Designs, only 13 are liquid (that’s 8%). 4 of these are from Dave Shea’s original examples. Of those remaining 9 the most recent is from April 2004.

Jeremy Keith has a strong suspicion that many people are choosing fixed width layouts simply because it’s the done thing.And while I agree with him, I also have a strong suspicion that people are choosing fixed width layouts simply because they are easier to ‘draw’ in Photoshop.

So, I finally got around to upgrade to WordPress 1.5 (can you tell?) and installing a couple of plugins and figuring out how this whole templating thing works (thanks to a handy tutorial and to Dave for being on the other end of MSN when I thought I’d messed it up)

So now I can get on with blogging SXSW, right? Well, kinda.

Meri, Simon and I all decided we were going to take business cards with us to SXSW, prompted by a combination of The unofficial geek guide to getting over yourself at SxSW Interactive 2005, and the OK/CancelTrading Cards from last year. After their adventures in Newport at the passport office, Meri and Simon used a machine at Bristol Station to make some. And I decided to put my hibernating printer to good use and make my own.

So I did. And I printed them on 5″x3″ index cards, because that’s what was available at 10pm the night before a 5am start to a 21hour journey. Which meant they’re a little on the oversized side.

I just made my first submission to deviantART.

Well, it keeps the boredom at bay.

I meant to write this about a week ago when I was sent the link, but I’m being hideously disorganized since finishing my degree (woohoo!!!) and so have only just gotten around to it.

Anyway, this article discusses the relationship between how realistic an artificial human is and how attracted we are to it. The basic concept is that as a robot or animation becomes more realistic we get more attracted to it (a microwave compared to R2-D2 or C3P0 perhaps.) However there is a point where the gap between the robot/animation and a real person is so small that the eye focuses on what’s not there. This discrepancy is known as “Uncanny Valley” and facial expressions are generally the hardest thing to get (convincingly) right.

Given that the face has more independant moving parts to it in a smaller space than any other part of the body the complexity of getting an expression right is fairly straightforward. And given that many of these elements aren’t actually that independant at all and each reflects slightly differently on another, you have yet another layer of difficulty. Also given the range of expressions that can be created by really tiny movements and it’s hardly suprising that it’s apparenlty so easy to “just miss” an expression. And there are, of course, other factors.

So, what next?

Do we keep pushing for the potentially unreachable lifelike proto-human, and put up with the Uncanny Valley for a bit longer or do we opt for stylized graphics?

I don’t have time to write a proper piece at the moment so here’s a few links that Meri sent me during the week.

Mouse and friend - Two handed input particularly for drafting and graphics. (also on Slashdot)
I for one would love more detail on how this works… or even what it looks like, the only images of it have peoples hands in the way…

Game industry facing creativity crisis“The video game industry is facing a hardening of the creative arteries as aging gamers’ tastes increasingly shift toward sequels and games based on movies…..With more and more titles chasing the success of their predecessors …. the industry is faced with a question more serious than rhetorical: What’s new?”

Gaming prowess in your pocket: The move towards handheld consoles.

First look at PSP software … and some interesting spec details:

This is quite a good article on Integrity and Photoshop.(Cheers to Meri) Bearing in mind the insane amount of editing you can do with the various pieces of digital imaging software ( like these for example - thanks again to Simon for the link) is integrity, and fidelity to what the camera saw an issue?

Well, with traditional photography and developing there is still a lot you can do to “improve” the quality of you photographs. There are ways to adjust Hue, Saturations, Brightness, Contrast, Sharpness and Blur to start with You can select exactly which part of your negative you want to print… and you can always trim the edges of the paper afterwards.(not to mention taking Black and White instead of colour because it (to quote friend of mine) “makes it look less shit… oh sorry, I mean, it’s more flattering”)

The objective of the photographer is to get the viewer to see what they they want them to see - which may or may not actually be what they saw… and the manner in which they do this is up to them. If they are taking light falling through trees, then they may well wish to increase the contrast in order to better point out what they are illustrating.

Integrity in Photography isn’t exclusive to digital. The number of faked UFO pictures and the like is testimony to that… but perhaps with the rise of digital photography allowing you to effectively develop your own photographs the tricks are becoming more widely available, and more widely publicised.

Here’s a clever little technique I discovered/made up for creating Lichtenstein style images from other images using Photoshop.

1. This technique works best with bold images - it really doesn’t work well with faces - I chose a picture of a big shiny motorbike.
   
2. The first thing you need to do is Duplicate layer

   You can either do this via the Layers menu, or by right clicking on the correct layer in the Layer Palette (If you don’t have the Layers Palette go to Windows > Layers)

3. Hide this new layer (click on the eye next to it in the Layer Palette) - you won’t need it for a bit



4. To create the pixels you need to use the Colour Halftone Filter: (Filter > Pixelate> Colour Halftone.

   The size you want your dots to be will depend on your image - for this image I used 4 pixels, but if that doesn’t work, try something else.

You want all your screen angles at 45 degrees.

5. Turn the duplicate layer back on again.



6. To create the lines you need to use the Find Edges Filter: (Filter > Stylize > Find Edges.)

   The lines this creates will probably be multi coloured - we want black lines.

7. The first thing to do is Desaturate: (Image > Adjustments > Desaturate) - This will make the lines shades of grey.
8. Then adjust Brigtness and Contrast (Image > Adjustments > Brightness/Contrast)

   You need to put the Contrast up to Full (100) then play around with the Brightness slider until you get clean lines. Where this point is will depend on your image.

9. Finally, set the Layer Style to Darken

And Voila

This has been floating around for a while now. Max Lyons has created the first digital photograph with over 1 billion pixels.

What he’s done is stitch together 196 6megapixel images to create a single shot. Combining images to create larger pictures isn’t new - it’s particularly useful for panoramic shots, or in tight spaces where you can’t get a wide enough angle or move any further backwards (due to pesky things like walls.)

But why bother?

Max’s answer is quite simple

‘”why not?” …. there has been speculation about when gigapixel images would become possible. This seemed like an interesting challenge to me. ‘

So there you go.

Couple of sites I found while looking for something entirely different:-

Mike’s Little Webpage has some very pretty bits of ray tracing on. Look at this example of shadows. The hairline is pretty impressive too…. a little to impressive…..

Fractalus.com Lots of fractal art and fractal landscapes and stuff…. Not sure what’s going on in the top left corner of the homepage tho……

It appears that while the makers of computer games are opting for a more “hand drawn” aesthetic, Disney, the pioneers of the full length feature cartoon are opting for computer generated characters (Link from Boing Boing)

It’s hardly suprising that computer generated characters are going to be far more commonplace (especially now there are Oscar and MTV award categories for them) but that doesn’t mean hand drawn doesn’t have a place in the industry and it would be a pity to see them go.

Incidentally here is Gollum’s MTV Award Acceptance Speech(Quicktime). It’s highly amusing. Apparently there’s a Yoda one out there somewhere too but I haven’t seen it and can’t seem to find it.

Continuing on the theme of computer graphics, here’s a link Shevek sent me. The Internet RayTracing Competition. Shiny….. I need enough time to do this sort of thing……

Daniel Etherington has written this article on the BBC site about video games trying to find a “new look”

I was particularly interested this game. XIII (Note: this isn’t the official site, but the content is pretty much the same - and the site is still by the game developers - the interface is just slightly better(read:less annoying))

The plot looks fairly familiar (unknown man wakes up in unknown place with amnesia, mysterious clues and people trying to kill him) - but the style appears rather different.

It’s not a totally new style for a game. GTA III & Friends (for example) had something similar for most of the stills, but I can’t think of a game that has used the graphic novel style quite so exclusively - certainly not recently.

While looking throught The Register today I found this rather worrying article.

Miss Digital World…. a beauty pagent for “computer-generated e-Babes”. Needless to say, I wasn’t quite sure if this was a wind up or not, so tried to find out more information.

Not to much avail. The official site isn’t working yet.

There’s a bit of a discussion on Slashdot and some bits and pieces on MSNBC and yahoo but they appear to be straight-from-press-release.

I’m not quite sure what I think of this.

On the one hand - as someone who wishes they had the time/ energy/ full-version-of-relevant-software-package&suitable-machine-to-run-it-on to create a computer model in that much detail I’ll be genuinely interested to see what comes out of the competition.

On the other hand - it might all be a bit sick and degrading really. There’s already too much pressure from Hollywood/Beauty Magazines (if you need proof have a look at the sort of things they can do with Photoshop - thanks to Simon for the link) etc for girls to tall and thin with the right sized bits in the right places - and “perfect” girls who don’t have to eat/sleep/reapply their makeup in the morning possibly aren’t going to help the matter much.