Kali Tal

January 25, 2007

Archiving Your Myspace Blog

A month or so ago I was complaining to my partner (a computer programmer) that backing up my blog on MySpace was a real hassle. Unlike for LiveJournal, there didn't seem to be any MySpace blog archiving and posting software out there. Backing up by hand was getting to be so time consuming that I often didn't bother to do it. Plus, there was no way to back up all the comments my friends have so helpfully posted.

My partner is a wonderful person, and he wrote a script to back up my blog. It worked great and I thought maybe other folks could use it, so I bugged him to make it generally available. I think it's a time and aggravation-saver if you want to back up a blog where you've posted a lot of entries. Plus, the nifty archive format lets you navigate your MySpace blog archives on your own computer and creates cool index and category pages to make it easier for you to search through your posts.

Check it out at http://www.spacewrapper.com.

If you like the service, feel free to pass the information around to your friends, post it in your blog, etc., so that everyone who wants a full copy of their MySpace blog on their own home computer can have one.

Posted by kalital at 7:33 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack

January 2, 2007

PhotoShop Experiment: Amsterdam with a Cutout Filter

I just got a great new book: Photoshop Filter Effects Encyclopedia: The Hands-On Desktop Reference for Digital Photographers (O'Reilly Digital Studio). CS2 is an incredibly powerful program and although I've been using PhotoShop for over ten years, like a lot of people my usage was limited to some specific things I had to do over and over again. I'd tried exploring the artistic filters before without much success because the results always seemed far to mechanical for my taste. When I paint, it's really spontaneous and anything that looks like a machine cranked it out... might as well be left as a photograph.

It turns out, though, that I was simply using the program incorrectly. The difference that clear instructions and a graphic tablet can make is astonishing. I began with a photo I took when I was in Amsterdam. Here's the original:

The angles are kind of interesting, but the photo feels fussy, with so much intricate detail pulling the eye away from the powerful lines. What I wanted to capture was the Victorian "painted lady" feel of the buildings, which reminds me a lot of the older parts of San Francisco. And I wanted a kind of 1920s-30s feel, like those large screened posters that are a hallmark of the Victorian city, from Paris and London to San Francisco. The key was the Cutout filter.

Whenever I'd used Cutout before I'd made a mess of things -- the image got very blocky and chunky and the large expanses of solid color looked artificial and sometimes arbitrary. Part of the problem was that I'd been choosing the wrong kind of shot. Cutout likes strong angles and contrast, so the Amsterdam photo was a good choice this time around.

This time, basing my initial filter passes on instructions from the book, I ran Cutout once, adjusted particular areas (the front righthand bottom triangle made by the partial ground floor of the bulding and the very last building you can see in the row running across the street) by selecting them with the Lasso tool, running the Clouds filter and then fading that to an Overlay blending mode. And then I ran Cutout again over the whole image. It was interesting trying out further spot corrections using the same method. One problem I ran into was that the blue of the sky bled into the white of buildings in a number of places. I solved this problem by using the Lasso to select out the areas that should have been solid, sampling the color I wanted to use to replace the blue, and then filling. Switching between wand, lasso, and eyedropper I "hand painted" the areas that needed fixing -- with the graphic tablet it felt very much likworking with gouache (I was looking for a similar flat finish). The final retouching step included blanking out a couple of logos and signs that interfered with the clean look of the image (and that would have interfered with selling the artwork on stock sites).

Then I resampled the whole image up to print at 600dpi in a 12"x16" size with Genuine Fractals. I can't wait until my new printer shows up and I can try it! In the meantime, you can get an idea of what it looks like, although the small jpg doesn't do justice to the crisp, clean detail of the full-size image:

Posted by kalital at 5:32 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack