The Water Buffalo Story

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water.buff.jpg

I’ve learned a lot from Philip Greenspun’s sites ( e.g. photo.net) over the years. Recently he wondered if giving a water buffalo as a present was a bad idea, since according to the charity’s site your donation is only “symbolic” (see fine print). I went and asked some local farmers in Chuxiong, China (where I currently live) what they thought about receiving a water buffalo as a gift, and they said it would be “zui hao de liwu”, or “the best gift.”

hand.thompson.jpgPhil asked if I could find a way to give an actual water buffalo to an actual farmer in need, so his gift wouldn’t just be symbolic. I think I can! A water buffalo is significant to local Chinese farmers. Not only is it worth about a one year’s salary (roughly 4,000 RMB or around $510 USD), but it can help them cultivate their crops. Tending to the land is otherwise done by hand.

I’m going to see if I can get this done in the next week, and post pictures and video of the process. Stay tuned!

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[UPDATE] “4 Generations” Water Buffalo Movie uploaded here.

Photoshop CS3 Bug Page

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See Photoshop CS3 Beta Bug Page

Maybe this is useful for PS developers at Adobe. Will keep it updated as I use PS.

Update: Get the latest news about the bugs in Photoshop at Adobe Labs.

You remember the PS CS2 tutorial I just finished? The same guy (Deke) teamed up with Lynda.com, an online training subscription website, and goes through most of the new features of CS3, step-by-step, in the same fashion as the tutorials I watched. I can’t believe they’re giving this away for free! I just watched the new Photomerge in CS3, coupled with the new Warp function, and yes, it is about 100 times better than even CS2.

Gallery, Adobe, Kunming

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headlights.jpgVIEW FLASH PHOTO GALLERY – Click the “?” in the lower right corner for Captions

ADOBE
First, I’ve been studying Photoshop CS2 for a week and learned some useful stuff. Quality stuff, I’m impressed with CS2 and InDesign CS. My favorite new features are the Bridge, Smart Sharpen, Warp and HDR. Vanishing point, I haven’t used yet, but HDR and warp are great features of CS2. Color coding your menus is cool, and the custom keyboard shortcuts are easy to use. Also, I’ve created a bunch of homemade Actions, and while not a new feature, is a great one anyway. I’m loving my new look at the Levels and Hue/Sat commands and knowing what they do, and successfully manipulating layer masks for the first time.

I’m glad to see that there is a PS CS3 Intel beta. I heard it took Tom 2 minutes to download, well you’ll be happy to know it’ll take me another 13 hrs 22 mins to get the last 500 megs.

KUNMING
We made it back to Kunming to find that our internet was shut off. Official explanation? “The plug dropped.” Yeah I don’t remember the last time an RJ-45 cord “dropped” out of the snapped-in connection. Something smells fishy, but it’s back and slow, and that’s all that matters!

HDR

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hdr_example-th.jpgPREVIEW EXAMPLE

Just learned about Camera RAW, DNG, and HDR 32-bit mode in CS2. I have a lot of photos I’ve already shot at different exposures, some in RAW mode, so I’ll have to test this out on my own pictures later. I remember you guys talking about this like a year ago so… It must be cool.

If anyone knows how to export from Photoshop CS2 in web mode, using ‘save for web’ WITHOUT washing out all the colors, please advise. In Adobe it looks great, export for web, it looks like dog doo. Furthermore, ‘Save As…” then JPG takes way too long and only lets you export at ambiguous “Quality” levels, 1-12, not 0-100 like in Fireworks.

Montage + Jeremy Cohen

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cmht-th.jpgENLARGE

There is no story, other than deleting things with masks.

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In other news, Jeremy Cohen’s Quartet San Francisco’s Latigo album was nominated for not one, but two Grammys – Best Classical Crossover CD and Best Engineered Classical CD. He recorded it at Skywalker Ranch.

Just FYI, last year the Turtle Island String Quartet won the Best Classical Crossover CD with their CD Four + 4, performing with the Ying Quartet, totalling eight performers playing classical and jazz compositions.

The fact that Jer got nominated for that AND Best Engineered Classical CD is simply amazing and I hope he wins.

First Ad

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first-ad.jpg

That’s right. No I didn’t just magic wand that background out, I edited the “blue” channel, copied it, then used levels to make it all wildstyle, then I made a mask and used the selection to take this out of the original image.

I don’t know about you, but I have eaten at Bob’s Ware-Howz many a time here in China. Except it’s not $4.95, it’s like $0.30.

All Wildstyle

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tutorial.jpg

smaller.jpgOriginal Image

Okay, so all images were provided and I followed along with dude, but I made this in CS2 in the “advanced layers / blending modes / knockout layers” chapter. I haven’t memorized the different blending modes, but basically ‘color’, ‘screen’, and ‘multiply’ seem to be used a lot. I think I studied these tutorials (chapters 1-17) for about 9 hours straight and only ate once today, so I’m pretty much ready for bed.

Look forward to more useless images tomorrow after the next 17 chapters of lessons! I’m kinda hooked on Photoshop, and I have to say, after watching the brain-taxing Pro Tools tutorials, and having a basic knowledge of image editing software already, these ones are pretty easy.

Anyway if you look closely you can see that ‘we’ applied a Blue-Man-esque tattoo thing on this guys face, parametrically! It’s a little like adding a plug-in on an audio file — it never changes the source file on your hard drive, it just reads the source and applies an effect, filter, or modulation, or whatever, afterwards. Pretty cool stuff I must say. Oh and another cool thing is the ‘knockout’ on his pupil, ‘we’ just put a little marquee (feathered, of course) on the top layer and punched through to the bottom layer of the group.

I can now say (with confidence) that I’m an expert at painting someone’s face all wildstyle in PS CS2, with the use of layers, blending modes, and a lot of free time.