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Pronunciation of 'Ruksznis'
Photoshop: Half-Ass Your Way to Another Time of Day!
HEY! So - I'm by no means an expert in day to night photoshopping - but I thought this might be a nice chance to share an attempt at it with others.
Finding The Photo
So I was looking through some of my really old photos and I found some of my dogg, Raggs (shown right). He's a tiny little thing, and is about to celebrate his 18th. He's old, wise, and single. Athletic build, ladies.
OK so I grabbed one of my photos of him because I was looking for an outside photo for this experiment. I think the photo below does him alot of justice - since it's him in his natural, threatening form. I'm pretty sure this shot was taken minutes before he ambushed 12 cats (neighborhood record).
Anyways, lets start!
To begin, i removed any items I thought my distract from the scene. Those items are a basketball hoop, a bright red car, and a vicious man-beast.
Next, I desaturated the whole scene, and boosted the contrast while lowering the brightness.
Next, I airbrushed over the ground-areas that i wanted shadowed. I did it in a dark green and set the layer mode to "Hard Light".
So we have the ground area setup, now lets do some slight tweaking to items above the horizon line. I selected the top half and put it on its own layer. After that, I adjusted the shadow levels (shown below). Once done, I fade this layer into the background layer.
This part gets tricky, but I basically made a new layer, set it to multiply, and brushed in all the bright skylight coming through the trees. After that, I set this layer to 90% opacity so some light was available for adjusting later.
OK, highlights! I pulled out all areas that I wanted affected by some sort of light source - whether it be moon, street light, whatever. I duplicated certain areas, boosted the brightness and contrast, then blended them in. In some instances, I dodged the areas.
Moon! (no, keep your pants up) - the next step was attaching a blue sogtlight layer to simulate a moon glow.
Moon again! I started adding it in by setting a bright blue circle to screen mode. Around it, I airbrushed a blue glow and set it to overlay. From here, we will see details emerge (hopefully!).
OK, now take your brush tool and spot around the areas of tree light surrounding the moon. Set this layer to Overlay.
Now I'm going to go through and highlight some edge areas. I chose, the rooftop, fencing, truck, wires, and trees (see below).
Final Touches!
Check the overall light levels. I merged all layers to a new one (CTRL+ALT+SHFT+E). From here I adjusted the contrast, added some new dodge-lighting, and enhanced some other little details.
In the end, I was left with this!
That's it, hope you liked it!
It certainly could use more work, but it was fun to experiment with...
Also,
PS Quickie: Meteor Invasion!
Create A Freakish Zombie in 11 Steps!
A Quick Tsunami Photoshop Tutorial
States Table
When I thought I was done, there were 49 rows in the table.
Stupid Utah.
iMarc Grows by Two
Craig Ruksznis and Dan Collins started earlier this week. Both will be part of the PHP development team.
Dan, a native of central Massachusetts joins us fresh out of Westfield State College. Craig joins us from the middle of Maine by way of St. Lawrence University.
So, please join us in welcoming Dan and Craig to iMarc.
Conflict, Perception and Bodegas
The story dealt with two well-established companies, their brand perception, and the internal conflicts facing each company as it's surroundings changed.
Any well-established company has a number of clients who have been with them since the beginning. It's true for iMarc. It's true for Pacific Green Gourmet. And it's true for Papa & Sons.
Pacific Green and Papa & Sons are neighborhood bodegas – small grocery stores – in Brooklyn. They are in different neighborhoods but are only separated by three miles.
Both neighborhoods are going through gentrification. Rents and housing prices are rising. In the neighborhood Pacific Green calls home, housing prices have doubled in the last four years. Many long time residents can't keep up, so they move out.
As each neighborhood becomes more upscale, the bodega owners see less of the old-time, local residents and more of the newer, wealthier residents. In the business world, you might equate this to getting larger clients or bigger deals.
The owners of the two bodegas found themselves in similar situations, but handled their business quite differently.
Pacific Green went all in. They stopped selling 99-cent tuna in favor of $20 imported tuna. They cleared their shelves of Campbell's and Progresso soup in favor of Wolfgang Puck Organic soup. Pacific Green's owner periodically traveled to stores in wealthier neighborhoods to check what was selling. There's not a Milk cooler in Pacific Green anymore—it's labeled, Organic Milk.
Papa & Sons took a different approach—the same approach that kept them in business for the past 15 years. Papa & Sons asked their clients what they wanted. In doing so, they ended up trying to cater to both their long time clientele and their newer wealthier neighbors. So far, selling organic free-range eggs along side Hormel Spam hasn't seemed to work.
Papa & Sons has twice the physical space of Pacific Green, but only does half the business.
One of the new residents in Papa & Sons' neighborhood was quoted as saying, "The fact that they have so many low-end products doesn't appeal to me. They sell Spam. I can't shop in a place that sells Spam."
That quote sums up brand perception. To customers, the company – and therefore the brand – is about feeling comfortable with the products on the shelf. Do people of my status shop here? Are the other customers and clients like me?
"They have so many low-end products..."
That quote also sums up a business' growing pains and the conflict between what got the business going versus where the business could go. Obviously, it was too difficult for Papa & Sons to clear out their low-end products.
How could Papa & Sons stop selling Spam or Ramen noodles or 99-cent tuna? Wouldn't that be a disservice to their long time customers? I wonder if the owner of Pacific Green had similar thoughts as he cleared his shelves of affordable goods, making way for fancy, organic, imported goods.
This conflict is amplified for the well-established business. A business that has been around for a while, like the neighborhood bodegas, correctly feels an obligation to its long-time customers. How can you abandon the customer who's bought your 99-cent tuna for the past 10 years and embrace the new face who's willing to pay $20 for tuna? Papa & Sons couldn't while Pacific Green did exactly that. As stated above, Pacific Green now does twice the business in half the space.
Conflict.
Ambiguity != Versatility
I used to do this all the time:
foreach ($a as $k => $v) {
// stuff happens
}
I don't do that anymore. Although maybe if I had an array full of 'As' with keys related to the letter 'K' and an inexplicable value that had something to do with the letter 'V'...
Meaningful naming conventions are even more important in database schemas.
Let's look at two examples of a MySQL table.
Read MoreLunchroom Banter (Volume XII)
- Patrick: Schilling just had a no-hitter broken up with two outs in the 9th.
- Fred: Damn...that's like writing 500 lines of code and having a parse error on line 499.
Will Bond Promoted to Senior Technical Architect
Whether it's pushing web standards and accessibility, focusing the team's programming practices, or implementing tools to streamline the development process, Will has been instrumental in driving technology at iMarc's. Over the past two years, Will has also played a key role in managing FreeBSD servers and networking.
...and if you need someone to fix your computer or get your email back up, contact Will immediately.
Recognizing his leadership and experience, iMarc is proud to announce Will's promotion to Senior Technical Architect.
Learn more about the incomparable Will Bond.
SEO: Can it be all so simple
Regarding search engine optimization and positioning, Seth Godin writes:
"If you want to be on the front page of matches for 'White Plains Lawyer', then the best choice is to build a series of pages that give people really useful information."
— Seth Godin in Building 43
Can it really be so simple? Yes, of course it can.
When we kick off a web project, one of the first things we try to impress upon the client is the importance of their content.
Write for people: Put yourself in the user’s shoes. They’re staring at your “Hours and Directions” web page. What do they want? What other pages might interest them? Write your content so it’s easy to cross-link and direct the user to other pages of interest.
Write for search engines: Use phrases that you think people will use in search engines. Perhaps you run a museum and think people will search for “history of shipbuilding”. Use that exact phrase where applicable. Instead of some fancy marketing lingo like “learn 18th century boat building traditions in our…”, rephrase that to “learn the history of shipbuilding in our…”. Decide on 4–5 key search phrases and lightly repeat them throughout your content.
Implement with standards, text, and hierarcy: Once you've written smart, informational content, any competent web developer should be able to edit your content for the web and design a standards-based, accessible website with clear hierarchy.
It's not rocket science. Google is clear about what they want.
Do you read your own website? Does it make sense? Is it useful? Did you like it? If you answered "Yes" to all of these, then your website content is probably in good shape. It's that simple.
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CAPTCHA: User-Unfriendly by Design
You may not of heard of CAPTCHA , but you've probably run afoul of one.
CAPTCHA is an acronym for "Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart"
Spammers run web-surfing "bots" that spam web forms in hopes that the content will be published back onto the web — in blogs like this one, for example. CAPTCHA is intended to tell apart real humans from spam-bots, a form of Turing Test.
The problem being, many CAPTCHA systems are so challenging that humans can't pass the test.
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