Monday, March 01, 2004
Well, we now have a new look for the site! About time...No pictures of us, because we haven't taken any lately. We'll have to do that one of these days. When we hit our goal weights...I'm almost there. I've lost about 20% of my original weight, not too bad. I guess you could say I have a new look, too!
Since the majority of what's happening is in the blog, I dragged it up to the front page. I also played a bit with CSS, Cascading Style Sheets, so now the links to everyone's pages are "cool". (Ok, nobody says that anymore, but I can't quite get into "sick", the latest word for cool/phat/whatever). Oh, and I fixed the little buggy I discovered that made the pictures go away, and the archives not work. So, you can get the full effect!
Since the majority of what's happening is in the blog, I dragged it up to the front page. I also played a bit with CSS, Cascading Style Sheets, so now the links to everyone's pages are "cool". (Ok, nobody says that anymore, but I can't quite get into "sick", the latest word for cool/phat/whatever). Oh, and I fixed the little buggy I discovered that made the pictures go away, and the archives not work. So, you can get the full effect!
Here's a gratuitous plug for some plug-ins: Applied Science Fiction, now part of Kodak, has these great plugins for photoshop. There are three plugins: Digital ROC Pro, Digital SHO Pro, and Digital GEM. The cool thing about these is that you can try them out before you actually buy them, to decide if they are worth your money. After all, they're not exactly cheap--but at under $300 for all three, not incredibly expensive, either.
If you want to try and go it alone, at least for the shadow fixing part, here's a tutorial on how to do it with photoshop. With the original version of Digital SHO, this method worked about as well, but the latest version--at least the pro version--has pulled ahead. And, the plugin is a lot easier to use...
Anyway, you can see the results I got from applying all three filters to a picture that I had a picture with a very strong back light, which threw everything else into shadow. With the ROC, SHO and GEM plugins, I was able to get amazing results, as you can see here. If you can only buy one filter, I'd suggest the Digital SHO pro, followed by Digital ROC pro. The GEM plugin is mostly useful when you've done a lot of adjustment, and it has made your picture a bit grainy. Then Gem will make it look nicer. But if you have a fairly decent picture to start with, GEM just fuzzes it up, since it is essentially a fancy unsharp mask kinda thing.
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