devvyn

I neglected to mention in other exciting news, I picked up my Cintiq and set it up, which was so exciting I didn't bother to post about it, lol. This thing is a display and a drawing tablet in one comfortable device. It uses a pen stylus with pressure & tilt sensitivity, an eraser and programmable rocker switches. The tablet itself features a 1280x800 LCD display with a great viewing angle and colour accuracy. It also has two sets of buttons and touch strips which are also programmable. It's so immensely more intuitive to control the cursor on the viewing surface I can honestly say it is fully worth the money. I wish I could demonstrate this for more people because it is really thrilling to sit in front of one and try it out.

The picture below is of the Cintiq being used in PhotoShop to colour in a line drawing someone posted to dA. If you want to see what I was working on, check the original here and the finished piece here.

Just testing out my retouching skills.  The first two images are separate shots direct from my digital camera, cropped.  The third image was produced in PhotoShop to combine the best smiles from each shot and remove distracting elements.  Foreground and background were separately balanced and the background was sligtly blurred.  Clothing fuzz and dark eye lines retouched.

Critique encouraged!  I never received formal training in photography or image editing so I'm kind of just ad-libbing everything, but I'd like to learn.
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Sometimes I get the urge to edit my room mate's wall paper over the network while he's deeply immersed in Final Fantasy XI.  I rarely choose not to act on that urge.  Here's round three of this running prank.  He pretty much expects it by now.  This was actually phase two of editing the same image.  Phase one was to replace his link pearl icon with the newbie pink question mark.  Phase two was to remind him that he can't escape from work into a fantasy world.  No no.  In fact, his character is now in a 7-11 uniform and posing for a magazine ad.

	unedited source from FFXI This was my room mate's wall paper. It's a screenshot from FFXI of his character attaining level 75. (Yes, I realise nothing is happening in the picture. That should tell you how exciting FFXI is.)
	unedited source from Google Images A photo of a 7-11 in Taiwan, pulled from a Google image search.
	finished combination This is the version of the wall paper I saved over the original, for my room mate to discover when he logs out of the game.

Well, I've gotten a bit better with PhotoShop lately, thanks to some practice in doing the recent colouring job of Chris Stadnyk's drawing. I've discovered the magnetic lasso tool, and I'm getting better at feathering selections properly. I also discovered how to paint transparency into an existing layer, so although it doesn't show here, the Gatorade bottle's clear portions are actually a little translucent. At any rate, what I did in the pictures below is to dig up my room mate Chris's wall paper from the hard drive in the folder where Windows stores the extra copy it reads from directly. I grabbed my brother's digital camera and photographed the junk Chris left out from the day before (it's always something, even though there's a garbage can within arm's reach beside him). As you can tell, I photoshopped the garbage into his wall paper (which is always a screen shot from Final Fantasy XI--it's what he does when he's not sleeping or working).

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