MKMoore Photoblog

Just some weeds.

Playing around with a new (to me) Photoshop plugin, FITS Liberator. After downloading raw image files in the FITS format from NASA or various universities you open them with Liberator. Then import then into Photoshop and edit them to get the types of photos you are used to seeing from the Hubble space telescope.

Start out with this. (Actually it takes 3 images of red, blue and green layered together to get the final image.)

Blue channel

End up with this. I filled in the blank space to keep from wasting black ink when printing.

Final

I’m going to download some more to play with to see if I can get better at it.

Decided to jump on the fake tilt-shift bandwagon. I went through 13 pages of the Flickr search and only saw 2 photos with a person as the main subject so I tried it on a couple older photos of mine with a person as the subject to see what would happen.

This one just needs some minor touch ups to get rid of some stray hairs on her face and maybe some different cropping but otherwise I like this one a lot.

This one would be better if I had started with a higher quality file I think. I don’t have very many wedding photos on hand and this is a low resolution PhotoCD file so it started out really blocky to begin with. The tilt-shift method actually improved it a whole lot. With a little more editing I could probably make it look a lot better overall and get it good enough to print.

For a tutorial on how to do fake tilt-shift look here, www.tiltshiftphotography.net. One thing I do differently though is to do everything on separate layers. Gives you a little more control over everything.

I need to change my workflow (I hate that word but it’s ingrained into my head now). Anyway, I need to start adding some sharpness before I upload photos here. I don’t know if it’s wordpress or what that makes most of my uploaded photos look really soft. The resized photos look fine on my local computer when using IrfanView but when viewed in Firefox they are exsessively blurry. At least I fixed the resizing bug.

Hopefully Joe will put more of these shows on. It was a good time while I was there. Heard there were some fights earlier though.

A little bit better luck with the macro lens. It was a little bit breezy so the photos aren’t quite as sharp as I would like. I’ll keep trying until I get a nice portrait of a bee at work.

Going to try to get a better shot later today. Didn’t have the macro lens on the camera so I couldn’t get a decent closeup.

Mondo is watching you.

This was scanned a long time ago with my first scanner and I went to redo it but now I can’t find the print. Was hoping to make a larger version. Oh well.