freemixology

Rands says:

Humans suffer from bright’n’shiny complex, where we’re titillated by the new. Think of it like this: have you actually done anything with that last domain you bought? No. You had the idea for it on Tuesday morning and you got all fired up, so you bought the domain the moment you got in to work. At lunch you furiously doodled your design in your notebook, fully intending to get home and get started on the HTML/CSS, and then you got home… and watched Lost.

Get… out… of… my… mind!

iPhone 1.0 really didn’t need a clipboard for two reasons:

1. there weren’t that many content generation apps that could take advantage of a clipboard, and
2. those that did had custom functions that allowed you to move data around, for the most part (e.g., attaching a photo to an email from within the Photo Album).

With the advent of the App Store, all of a sudden there are a myriad of apps, many of which would benefit from the ability to have data shuttled to and from them. Take the WordPress application, which I’m using right now to type this post. I’d like to provide hyperlinks to resources that are related to this post, but short of hand-typing them in, there’s no way for me to embed a link. Let’s say that after I finish this post I want to share it with the Twittersphere. Again, short of manually typing the post URL into Twinkle (my iPhone Twitter client of choice), there’s no way to perform this action. On more conventional computers, copy & paste would easily do the job. But copy & paste on the iPhone warrants deeper analysis, as the iPhone is hardly conventional.

Copy & paste is a multi-step process: select something, hit copy, move your cursor, and hit paste. The problem that Apple is faced with is in that very first step. Usually to select something, you would drag your mouse cursor over some text. On the iPhone, this gesture has been assigned to a different function: dragging scrolls instead of selects. Apple seems to be stuck on what to do about this dilemma. However, not all copy & paste tasks require fine-grained selection. I’d be willing to bet that most of the time, a “special-case” selection would suffice.

People move URLs around a lot, so how about a button that copies all URLs that are visible on a screen to a clipboard? The user could then switch programs, touch a field, hit a paste button, and select a URL to paste. Alternatively, there might be a button that copies all text out of an active field, and another button to paste the text into a different field. Since many fields are less than a sentence long (e.g., email addresses and note titles), even if you wanted only a portion of what was copied, it would be easy to delete what you didn’t want after pasting. These two mechanisms would easily take care of the problems I mentioned above.

The best part about implementing special-case copy & paste is that it doesn’t reserve any interaction gestures for its use. All it takes is an application developer to place a button on screens that are likely to benefit from clipboard functionality. Apple can then take its time to design a more general way to provide copy & paste, and not have to worry that it will conflict with special-case copy & paste.

Every new application that’s released will potentially exacerbate workflow issues caused by the lack of an iPhone clipboard function. A special-case copy & paste is a pragmatic near-term solution that can enable inter-application workflows and provide time for Apple to do the the proper human experience testing on a more general solution.

Ironic Sans proposes a design for a new type of electric outlet that delivers DC power directly. Such a plug would get rid of all those power bricks that devices require to convert AC to DC. What a great idea. I wonder what it would take for it to gain traction.

I have too many blogs, and I don’t update any of them nearly enough. The problem is that I jump from one project to another, and if you’re only reading one of them it seems as if I’ve fallen off the planet. Add to that the fact that I’ve found a use for Twitter, and I’ve been doing lots of that (come follow me, I’m leftspin). To solve this little dilemma, I’m resetting this blog by consolidating all of my writing under this domain from now on. It’s the only domain that I have where it makes sense to do so. Here are some of the topics that you might see here:

• Photography, as before

• Cloud computing—my company, Topia Technology, Inc., plays in this space with Skoot, our cloud data management application for Windows and Mac.

• Food, because I’m a foodie, albeit a shy one. Sometimes I take pictures of the food I cook.

• Mac & iPhone development

Don’t worry, all of these subjects will be nicely segregated into categories by a new site design that’s currently sitting in a Photoshop PSD file.

By giving myself permission to write about whatever I want in a single place, I’ll be able to post without fear of being off-topic.

Oh, and by the way, I’m a Mac user, but COMMAND-CTRL-EJECT just doesn’t have the same ring to it.

iLounge is having an iPhone 2.0 design contest, so I decided to give it a shot. I’ve previously played Photoshop tennis over at iStockPhoto.com, and this contest was just the ticket to get that side of my brain working again.

Here’s my entry: The iPhone Gesture. It was done with Lightwave 9, Photoshop, and Illustrator.

A (not so) funny story about Lightwave: I first used it on an Amiga when it first came out as part of the Video Toaster suite (I actually use to teach people how to use VT in college). After the Amiga platform died, I stopped using it, only to pick it up again for this project. Its user interface brings back some memories, as it hasn’t really changed much. I’m just amazed that something that originated from the Amiga platform still lives on as a successful product.

http://blindimagephotography.com/main.php

It’s like angry porn music.

Heaven is having so much RAM that OS X flows as smooth as silk no matter how many applications you run.

An acquaintance recently wrote to tell me that I suck at updating my blog. I agree with him—but I have an excuse: I have a very short attention span.

Okay, so I didn’t say it would be a good excuse, but there you have it.

Ideas always pop into my head at the most inopportune times. It usually happens when I’m stuck, or have writer’s block. I use to make myself focus. I would write the idea down, file it somewhere, and then try to forget about it. A little voice in the back of my mind would always tell me that I’d never finish anything. Regardless, I could never re-focus, and would end up wasting a lot of time anyway.

Recently, I figured that trying to focus on my current task was a stupid strategy. It’s hard enough trying to build motivation to do something, and here I was trying to suppress it.

These days, if I get excited about something, I work on it. As for the project I was working on, I just have faith that I’ll get back to it. If I don’t, then maybe it wasn’t that important.

This blog is one of those projects. I don’t want to stop writing it, but then again I don’t want to feel I have to write it. That takes all the fun out of it. This time, the release of the iPhone SDK has me busy. But don’t worry, I’m still around.

I do have another image in the works. My dad recently bought a Seattle Mariners collectable train set. The image is about half-done, but when I finish it, I’m sure I’ll have something interesting to post. In the mean time, here’s the partially finished image to whet your appetite.

Okay, here’s how the Jordan image came together:

(If you want to focus on one of the steps in the above animation, clicking on it will open the current frame in a new window.)

1. The base image.

2. Here, I darkened the orange background so that his face draws most of the focus. I did this simply by creating a Curves adjustment layer, and painting in the background.

3. Here I removed blemishes and evened his skin tone.

4. His hands ended up being darker than his face because of how it was lit. I didn’t catch it at the time, but it was quick work in Photoshop to brighten it up using an adjustment layer and a layer mask.

5. Overall color balancing: I desaturated everything a bit, and used a Color Balance adjustment layer to pump a little yellow into the highlights. By the way, in my opinion you can improve most portraits by pumping a little yellow into the highlights.

6. The image was somewhat dull, so I increased the local contrast by using the “Making Photos Pop” technique with a large radius.

7. I didn’t have much control over the placement of the window in the background, so I added a vignette to put even more focus on Jordan. Here’s how to create a quick vignette: create a new layer filled with white, create a layer mask, use the circular marquee tool to draw an oval in the general shape of the vignette, fill with black, gaussian blur the layer mask (containing the oval), and finally adjust the layer opacity down to taste.

8. This is the step that gives your image the “illustration” look, evident in the final image. Basically, you exaggerate the highlights in your subject by “dodging” them. In this image, I focused on his face, hair, and clothes. I especially like doing this to wrinkles, like on his jacket and jeans.

   Exaggerating the existing highlights is easy, but sometimes you need to imagine how light would fall in a perfect lighting situation and paint those highlights in too. Figuring that out just takes practice and messing up a lot. Since I dodged on a separate layer, mistakes didn’t cost me anything. You can use the dodge tool and rely on undo, but a better way is to create a Curves adjustment layer that lightens the image, and then paint in the layer mask. Then, you can leave your non-drawing hand on the “x” key to quickly switch between white and black to dodge and un-dodge, respectively.

   By the way, this step is best done with a Wacom tablet. If you don’t have one of these and are serious about photo manipulation, you aren’t doing yourself any favors. I know they can be expensive, but the control they afford is completely worth it. Buy one, like, now. You don’t need to buy the biggest one, but don’t go too skimpy. The smallest one you should even consider is this one, which is a newer version of the one I use. Trust me, in this case size is important.

   One other thing, just so I can come away from this article with a clear conscience, that Wacom tablet link is hooked up to my Amazon affiliates account. So if you buy a tablet using that link, then you’ll be supporting this site. Just make sure you use that link, or if you want to, this one. These are not the droids you are looking for. Move along.

9. In this step I again increased local contrast to further augment the painting I did in step 8, so I applied the pop technique again, with a large radius.

10. Again, this time with a small radius, which makes the image look crispy. Look at his clothes. You can almost see the fibers. Check the hair. Be warned: it is very easy to overdo this step and over-sharpen. This is all a matter of taste. Some days I look at this image and think it’s over-sharpened. Some days I think it gives it that hyper-real look. I like to think that makes it just right.

11. This step is the opposite of step 8, where I “burn” instead of “dodge”. The technique is the same, but you create a Curves adjustment layer that darkens instead of lightens. In this step, I burned in areas where I thought shadows might naturally fall that happened to coincide with the vignette, which put further focus on the subject.

Well, there you have it. Many of my images, especially portraits, have these techniques applied to them, and not always in the order I presented. I hope this discussion wasn’t too advanced, but in case you need further clarification on one of the steps, just leave a comment. Maybe I’ll make it the topic of a future post.

One final note: I encourage you to try the steps above on your own, and then post your images up on the freemixology flickr group for everyone to see. The site is new, so there probably won’t be much there yet, but hopefully it will become a great way to learn from one another.

As promised, here’s “Removing Blemishes and Freckles”. I apologize that it’s a day late. Murphy was biting me in the butt trying to get these video uploaded to my ISP.

I’ve also posted another tutorial, “Layers and Masks”. Using layer masks is a very important basic technique that I use in almost every step in the process. If you don’t have a firm grasp of masks, be sure to watch and understand this video. You’ll use this technique over and over again.

The first few steps in creating the Jordan image involved removing facial blemishes, and to generally clean up other scene elements that I thought were distracting. After all of the other related tutorials are posted, I’ll wrap it all up with a post that discusses how they all come together to make the image.