Digital UK Design Blog
The Floating Frog and Piggynap had a competition to see who could make the best pumpkin. We won’t say who made which at this stage to make it fair, just drop in a comment below with either pumpkin1 or pumpkin2. I’ll count the votes from this, and my other sources then reveal the winner, get voting!
Ok so the Credit Crunch will throw the financial sector into turmoil for the next few years but lets look at some positives that have come out of this.
I’ll start things of:
2) House prices have gone down – this is fine even for home owners like me. I may have to sell low but I also can buy low too, only there will be more first time buyers on the market, good news for the housing market.
3) Petrol Prices – I’m now paying 25p a litre less than I was 2 months ago.
4) Gas & Electric – going down hopefully soon.
Ignore the negatives for now, what good has this Global Credit Crunch thrown your way?
Retailers will be hard hit this year thanks to the Credit Crunch as consumers, you and I, tighten our purses in the lead up to the big man’s big day. I myself have set strict budgets this Christmas so I now how much I’m willing to spend and who’ll get what.
Moneysavingexpert have a very useful free automated budget planner that you can use to organise your finances.
Yep the good old CSS box model, explained once more. The CSS box model is a fundamental element of modern web design that all web designers need to master. This CSS box model controls and details the behaviour of many HTML elements, such as DIV, P, ul, so understanding this is a firm step forwards to better web design.
Jon Hicks, who’s a leading figure in web standards and userbility, has created this brilliant 3D CSS Box Model diagram and kindly supplied the original Illustrator file for me to modify and put on the site for you to look at, so a big thanks goes out to him.
CSS is an abbreviation for Cascading Style Sheets. Web designers use a CSS file to control the visual layout of a web page, grouping all styling declarations into one reference document while removing them from the HTML code that lies beneath the website.
If you’re an absolute newcomer to the scary world of web design and wish to start learning things from scratch then this is the place to be. Over the next few weeks I’ll be posting walk-through slideshows that explain CSS and XHTML visually, in an easy to digest format. This week it’s…
Credit: All copyright and materials Slideshare.net.
What’s covered in this slideshow presentation:
Well I guess your too good for this, it’s like child’s play, right? Well have a look at this, 10 CSS shorthand techniques you’ll use everyday, it will be more up your street.
Yearly events like Halloween, Christmas and Bonfire night gives photographers the perfect chance to experiment with their photography and capture some memorable moments on camera. To inspire us all to get our cameras out this year I have put together 20 fantastic photographs to inspire and excite even the most experienced photographer. Take inspiration, then get creative as you only get one chance a year to get this right.
It started with a kiss…
A dread spread
Tonight’s Moon
“Horned Hamster”
Welcome hoooome
Pumpkin Pile
The Awakening
Dead Dolls
Ghost Train
Have a happy pumpkin day
The Grudge
The Children
Zombies on the orange line
Drunken pumpkin
Pumpkin lamps
Bee
Nightmare Before Christmas
Busting at the Seams
Teschio
Creepy
Have fun this Halloween
Remember the saying “When I grow up I want to be a tree”? Well some tree’s seemed to of heard us and decided to do the reverse, and grow into people! Seriously, it’s brilliant! Ingenious!
The artists responsible for these creations call their new fangled art Pooktree, which is the shaping of trees as they grow in predetermined designs. Some are intended for harvest to be high quality indoor furniture and others will remain living art.
It’s awesome, you should checkout their website.
Istockphoto.com is becoming the industry’s leading microstock website, with over 3.5 million stock photos, illustrations and videos in it’s archive. I use it daily at work to source stock photography for client’s websites so you can imagine how much money we push through to them. I was overjoyed to find an open discount code that claimed to knock 20% off orders over $60 (£30-ish). I entered it during checkout and it worked! Sweet!
Enter TWIP
Complete checkout and you should get 20% off.
On my last order I got over £40 off, so it’s well worth the punt.
Enjoy!
Like myself, many amateur photographers start out in photography by shooting in JPEG file format as apposed to RAW. The issue with shooting in JPEG is that it limits what a photographer can do in Post Processing, also, the quality of the final photograph will never match that of one taken in RAW.
The issue with shooting in JPEG is quite simple, when you take a shot the photograph is saved. During this saving process the JPEG basically decides what data is needed in the photograph, and what data isn’t essential and removes it. Hence why JPEG file sizes can vary dramatically… have you ever noticed?
RAW is different as it keeps every piece of data the camera captures, resulting in larger file sizes. This data, which the JPEG would have otherwise discarded, can be used to enhance a photograph in the post processing stage.
I’ll give you an example:
If you go into a dark tunnel with minimal light and take a picture in JPEG format you probably won’t be able to see anything when you view it on a computer. The file size will be quite small because all the data will be lost. Now shot it again in RAW and the file size will be a lot bigger, but here’s the trick, you can now post process the image to enhance any details hiden alway in the shadows. The data is still there only it is, quite literally, hiding in the shadows.
I did recently while out on a shoot and revealed some amazing graffiti in an old railway tunnel, and a door I never knew was there. Underexposed images can also be rescued if shot in RAW, but here’s the catch… you have to process them yourself. JPEG’s, as explained, do this for you but give you less control. Time to test some software to help me achieve this.
I use Adobe Photoshop everyday, it’s great for designing and image manipulation but isn’t completely geared up for photography management and RAW processing. I could use Adobe bridge (part of the CS pack of software) but I didn’t like it particularly. Aperture, by Apple, another tool aimed at photographers but again, it just didn’t impress. Aperture is bulky, unstable and a nightmare to use.
Now Adobe Lightroom 2 has been recommended to me by a lot of photographers, so I decided to download a free trial and try it out.
User interface – I love it! It’s clean and tidy. It cleverly hides away all of the advanced options that may clutter the design and scare me, a mere amateur, away.
There’s 5 area in which to explore, starting with Library, other include Develop, Slideshow, Print and Web.
So far I have only used the first two so I’ll talk about these in summary.
Library – The default viewer window when the application opens. Import your RAW files and the library will display them in a standard thumbnail way. Double-click to start your basic post-processing. The right column allows ‘Quick developing’, something that I found great while I got used to what RAW files can other. Histograms, quick processing options and EXIF data is offers here, typically the options most used by myself to process an image.
Develop – This section gives you far more scope to allow full control over the processing you want to apply. Basic image teatment ( like exposure, white balance), Tone Curve, HSL/Color/Grayscale, Split toning and detail options give you everything you need.
The clever thing about Lightroom is that every tweak you make, Lightroom records it in a history, just like Photoshop. You can also copy and paste processing tweaks on single images through an entire collection, something that really impressed me. Actions in Photoshop does of course do this but it’s clumsy, where as Lightroom handles this effortlessly, and intuitively.
Lightroom keeps the ‘master’ copy of an image in the background so you never need to worry about backing it up. Aperture handles master copies differently, but it was too advanced and confused the hell out of me.
All in all a lot of the features Photoshop has (photograph related) can be found in Lightroom. Things like Presets, Snapshots, History, Histograms, Navigator and so on. I have found the transition from Photoshop effortless. If, like myself, your an advanced Photoshop user wishing to delve into RAW post processing, Lightroom is a wise choice of software to use.
This software is certainly my first choice. Price wise, at £199 + VAT RRP ($299) it’s competitively priced. Features included would appeal to both the beginner and the professional.
If you use Photoshop and want an easy transition to a RAW editing suite (and much more besides) then I highly recommend Adobe Lightroom 2.
Don’t this is more than just a photo editing suite, it’s aimed at those wanting to create slideshows of their photos, optimising for the web as well as sophisticated printing options.
This is my first photo processed with Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 2 on the Mac
Simple, download the free trial and see for yourself, then let me know your verdict.
Sorry about the lack of posts recently, things are a bit hectic.
I have two draft articles that I haven’t gotten around to tidying up yet – one reviewing my online selling experience with Gumtree, Craigslist, Stuff4Sale and Preloved; the other reviewing my Garmin Forerunner 405. Plus I have photos of the garden from about 2 months ago which I still haven’t posted up, rubbish!
Also I have a load of GPX data and photographs from Hornsea back in August which I haven’t put on OpenStreetMap yet … which makes me wonder whether this mapping business was a bit of a flash in the pan for me, more on that later.
It’s going to be a while until I get these bits and pieces finished too because this week we start ripping out our old kitchen and replacing it with some ‘hand me down’ units and a new floor and the like.
I will however hopefully be finding time to visit the nice people at Ryedale Linux User Group this week – fingers crossed anyway.
Manea’s dream is to go back to Romania and find his mother. He smiles inside his beard, looking upward.
Manea is currently homeless and thinks his mother may be dead, or worse, she may not remember him.
All Rights Reserved – Trey Ratcliff – From Stuck In Customs www.stuckincustoms.com
©2006 - 2009 The Floating Frog
