Hi guys. Just wanted to share this method of creating film grain as it ends up being far superior to alternatives. There are of course other alternatives like using emulation plugins. Alien exposure 3 is a great example. I just felt that this gives a bit more control.
The quick overview for this tutorial is that I use the dissolve blend mode to create noise that is based on the density of the luminance. check out the video for the full tutorial.
See the high res finished result here: http://sympa.me/?p=834
See my layered psd here (dimensions downsized): http://www.mediafire.com/?cbbbtc9ao7688gf
Original Stock from Niniel on Deviantart. http://niniel-stocks.deviantart.com/art/215-153453454
Man this guy can sing the fuck out of a song.
Sometimes you see something and you just drool. This is the Hamilton ODC X-02 Quartz Watch. It was released in 2009 but apparently still too new to put on Hamiltons website.
More Watch Porn at flylyf.com
Just wanted to take some time to post about OmmWriter. And thats exactly what its about, taking the time to write. In-fact I’m writing this post with Omm.
Omm is a relatively new app for writing in the scheme of things. It’s unlike any other app I’ve tried as it focuses specifically on the process of writing. It provides a clean and serene environment in which to work. The application opens and immediately you are greeted with a large serene snowy landscape and soft music playing in the background. Accompanying keystrokes there are also sounds that can be specified but are on the whole very calming even on default. The summation of all the effects leaves you with a clear clean environment to write in.
The application doesn’t focus on supporting code or many of the other bells and whistles that writing applications are trying to include these days. You know what they say – Jack of all trades and master of none? Well Ommwriter is a master of writing. It feels comfortable, whimsical, and focused. The only downside to this application is that is only for mac right now. I’d love to see this app expanded to more platforms and even devices, especially the ipad.
Intro OmmWriter Screen
Sample writing.
I strongly encourage everyone to give this app a try!
OmmWriter, Cheers!
I designed this theme from the ground up to be fun and clean. Ever since I saw the Acamas Child theme from the Thematic Framework I’ve tried to work toward a Serif based design aesthetic. Something about it just really struck a corde with me. Part of it is that I always see so many sans serif based pages on the web and it sort of bothers me. It feels as if there is a see of websites with no real deviation in type.
I chose to work specifically with Georgia rather than embedding a fontface just because it felt right. Alot of my design has come from what feels right these days but I’ve also learned alot of miniature rules for leading to keep handy. For example the idea amount of leading for type is between 1.3 em and 1.6 for size 10-14 type . I also learned a bunch about x-height of letters when applied to web generated typography that I didn’t really know about previously. Its surprisingly similar how many traditional terms and settings are carried over from Letterpress to CSS. I’d like to share some of the scripts are wordpress tricks that have made this layout possible. Special thanks to Christopher who helped with some javascript/jquery trickery and my slideshow scripts!
Scripts
Jquery Cycle My Slideshow.
Lytebox Lytebox – Might switch this to fancybox sooner rather than later.
WordPress Trickery
Multiple single page themes.
Set this is the content for single.php and then make two new pages with whatever structure you like named single1.php and single_default. The single.php page looks to see if the posts are in category work, if they are then use the first template, else use the second. Useful for have a custom themed portfolio section vs a blog section!
Dynamically loading Scripts & Css
This ones pretty straight forward. All you have to do is use conditionals – wordpress has some great examples already posted here
I do realize the importance of profiling your own paper but honestly there’s a limit. I recently bought s few boxes of Moab Entrada photo rag at the recommendation of a friend. I’ve recently also purchased an Epson 3880. I haunt had time to reptile the papers that I normally use so i decided to go ahead and try the moab stock profile they provide on their website.
All I have to say is; terrible. There was banding all over my images anywhere between 60-40 luminance. I could understand 20-40 because mist papers tend to fail toward the shadows but honestly you can do better in making profiles moab. I profiled the paper myself and all is well now however I would figure if you are going to offer profiles that you should at least make them worthwhile. Its not like the only thing that you guys do is make high quality printing paper. Owait…
I’m writing this post from my brand new iPad. I just bought I’d weigh in and let you guys know what i think from personal experience. There’s been alt of conjecture of people calling it an oversized ipod touch but you really need to use an iPad before you can make a decision about it. It isn’t easily hand held like a phone row touch it requires you to actually have a surface for it to be used on top of. It forces you to use the machine differently that you would a conventional laptop. As far as performance goes I am very happy with the battery life. Ive had no issues with wifi or overheating as other users have reported. Another point of conjecture has been the keyboard but I honestly don’t have my issues with it. As far as I’m concerned the iPad is a very comfortable intermediary between a laptop and an iPod. There is also the current debate about flash. What people need to understand bout flash is that it is a periferal. It was built in order to work around what browsers were capable of at the time. Since then advances in java and html5 have largely removed the necessity for flash. I won’t be missing flash it wad just an step along the way to better browsing.
Noise may sound like a relatively simple concept to handle but because of the deeper intricacies of noise I am going to have to split this post up into a few groups, an intro, Pre-production and post-production. By pre and post I am referring to in camera and in photoshop This first post will be an intro to noise in general. With a greater understanding of what noise is and how it works we can progress and understand some techniques both in pre and in post to handle this problem.
First things first, what is noise?
Wikipedia defines noise as
Image noise is the random variation of brightness or color information in images produced by the sensor and circuitry of a scanner or digital camera. Image noise can also originate in film grain and in the unavoidable shot noise of an ideal photon detector.
Image noise is generally regarded as an undesirable by-product of image capture. Although these unwanted fluctuations became known as “noise” by analogy with unwanted sound,[1] they are inaudible and actually beneficial in some applications, such as dithering. Wikipedia, 09
Meaning in short that noise is simply ‘extra’ data. A common related misconception is that noise is strictly limited to digital. This is incorrect. Noise is also in film. Noise in film operates a little differently though.
How film works
The way film works is there are layers of photosensitive pigment that react when exposed to light. These pigments compromise the ‘noise’ you see in your images. Often times color film images will have less noise because they have three photo sensitive layers, red green and blue that all pick up color simultaneously, thus churning out the color image, while black and white film only has one layer. More layers equals more concentrated = smoother tone. Refer to the images below for a better understanding of how film actually works.
What about digital?
Well, digital works a bit differently. Digital doesn’t use a chemically based system with pigment, it is all done with an image sensor that records light in red green and blue values. It works similarly to film in the sense that there are three different receptors for color, the RGB but in a sensor the colors are lined up along side one another in a grid format rather than on top of one another. There are often more red and green receptors in censors because image censors are built in consumer cameras to mimic the color spectrum and color temperatures we see. You can see an drawn image on wikipedia here if you want a close look at a censor. However, at the censor level is where noise comes in to play with digital.
Types of noise (digital)
There are two main types of bad noise and a third more desirable type, amplifier, salt-and-pepper, and uniform. Amplifier noise is usualled caused by heat within the image sensor and additional noise occaisionally from cameras boosting the blue channel of an image. Refer to the afore mentioned green and red receptors outnumbering the blue receptor. In more images most noise is in the blue channel because of this boosting.
Salt-and-pepper noise is a combination of two Problems. One are hot pixels that show up on your sensors – these are pixels that just display a color incorrectly all the time. Similar to if you’ve had a dead pixel on your monitor before or one just displaying incorrectly.
The last kind of noise is uniform noise. This is usually the good stuff that looks normal to the eye and in most cases helps prevent banding. It is a way of preventing large scale pattern forming.
Noise is inherent in every digital image because of the way the image is captured. There is no such thing as an image with-ought noise (in camera). Noise in digital is not like film where it is necessary to produce an image. However a degree of noise can provide a sharpness of detail because visually all noise is, is the degree of value difference between one value to another. A low noise image will not have great value differences in the noise from dark to light, where-as a very noisy image will have more noticeable problems and there will be more value jumps visible within the grain.
This is an important concept to keep in mind when trying to correct noise. There is such a thing as bad noise and good noise. Good noise can precent a nasty thing called banding, and add subtleys to your image; both of which I will include in the last installment of these noise posts. Bad noise on the other hand can ruin an image and make your life miserable.
Here’s what it boils down to. You want to get rid of any salt-and-pepper noise along with any amplifier noise, while keeping intact the uniform noise you have within your image. At least, this is the premise. You may in-fact want a totally smooth image which is fine, just make sure thats the look you are going for intentionally and not a by-product of some bad photoshopping.
Stay tuned for the next few articles on noise including walkthrough methods written by me on how to deal with it!
Posts still in the work detailing digital noise. In the mean time though I wanted to share some teaser images from two brand new portfolio's I am working on. The first titled Grey is set in the Marin Headlands. I use fog in this work as a transformative element to strip a landscape of its place in time. The fog just works within the image to make it feel dreamlike. So far this series has been a real pain but with some paying results. Look forward to the series being published in a month.
The second portfolio is based around homes in my home town of Castro Valley. I just started this and am very excited. I didn't have a real goal or theme when starting to create this work but as I've continued it has evolved of its own accord. The work has become about romanticizing these homes. I may branch out from just working on the homes but for now here are the teasers.
Well almost, so fair enough! I’ve added a ton of content to the site expanding it way past simply a blog. The addition of the sweet Jquery effects is all thanks to this article by Kevin Liew. He has some really amazing tutorials listed there and I highly recommend giving his site a full review. In addition to the Jquery affects I’ve also added a version of the lightbox effect by Lokesh Dhakar. The version I am using is called LyteBox. This version just feels more approachable and customizable. Last things to finish are fixing the footer properly as well as finalizing a design for the contact page.
In some new posts I will be discussing some retouching techniques I feel everyone will appreciate that owns a digital camera: in short a few very good ways to deal with noise. I’ll also be providing some sample files to work with!
Also you might expect some notes on hunters as I am back playing world of warcraft again
Hello all. As some of you have undoubtedly noticed my blog is currently being updated to a new theme. I just wanted to give credit where credit was due though. The original theme is called Manifest, a single column theme written by Jim Barraud. The theme is a clean and simple just the way I love it and comes by default with a nice roman style typography based feel. However I wanted to change things up a bit and restyle the theme with the colors and theme that has been created with the mint anaylitics program. The revamp of the site should be done within the week. Hope this hasnt become too much trouble for anyone!
Oh the times they are a changin.
-Bob Dylan
I’ve just realized that my last summer was my last real summer. I feel at times that I squander my time. That I could have been more productive rather than lax and idle. However the immediate counter is what else would I have really done with my time? Thats right folks its time for wow ethics.
There comes a time in every gamers ‘life’ if you will where you really have to take a step back and evaluate your priorities. You sit back and thing “Is what I’m doing with my time really worthwhile or time well spent? Does it actually benefit me?” The long and short of it is a swift no.
However all work and no play makes johnny a dull boy (or something like that). There is no fathomable way to judge how much time you would actually spend being productive if the subject actually interested you. I mean just imagine the amount of time you spent on a daily basis playing or being lax. There was a study I remember reading that quoted something like out of an 8 hour work day people only usually work about 5 hours. What do you do with the rest of your time.
You play, you learn, you relax. I suppose this is all based on feeling a little remorseful about my time spent in previous summers. Feeling that I can no longer realistically alot myself the same amount of time to enjoy being idle. Instead I get to enjoy the workforce.
For a time I did not update my website at all. Partially this was due to really disliking the overall layout I was left with using the last theme I modified. I also think the change was in part reflective of my own personal tastes. Since making the switch though I am really enjoying my new theme. I will continue to modify and tweak it!
My hat is off to Ian stweart, creator of the Acamas Theme which I am currently using. I have modified it a bit thus far but I really enjoy the clean and simple elegance that the heavy use of serif fonts promotes along with a clean grid based style. It feels very letterpress-like to me. I also feel that the serif heavy theme lends a bit of weight to the overall feel of the website. Reminds me a bit, in the historical sense, how architects in San Francisco mainly built the american gothic style, and how architects where mainly chosen who attended le ecole des beaux arts; a school which emphasized teaching traditional styles. However, thats a post for another day!
You can find more themes of varying styles all based around the open source base of the theme called thematic at Ian’s website here:
H4xor.org was a service born out of the need for a drag and drop image utility for macs. All the widget did was directly upload whatever content placed into the widget (with a reasonable file size) and hosted the content on the web. It even set your clip bord current copy/paste option to a shortened url like tiny url if you wanted. However we are now left with this sad messege on the websites main page.
Hi, all. Due to h4xr’s exponential growth, my (free and generous) host is unable to support it, and I can’t afford a paid host with the amount of data h4xr uses. However, if by some miracle I can afford to bring h4xr back, then I will let you know…somehow
. You can always support me bydonating with a credit card or PayPal. Peace.
– Patrick
All I can say is that I’m extremely sad to loose this service and would love it if it were to come back in whatever form. I’ve seen some of the other options such as the imageshack uploader widget but honestly everything else seems to pale in comparison to h4xor.org. This is also one of the reasons why many of the images on this blog are now broken links. If anyone knows of another similar service please let me know! Hope this has explained a bit why there are now so many lost images. In the future I’ll do my best to use another service.
PTR is up!
Sleepy sleepy. Another day with stuff to do that I don’t want to. I hate being on a schedule.
Where have all the apps gone! The river has dried up! All thats left is a dwindling creek.
Recently got a question on my blog in the last post.
I’ve been following ur blog for awhile, how does your spec hold up in raids dps wise and vs other classes mages hunters warlocks etc and vs other dps dks that are running 2h blood/fury, and what do u think about dw tank vs 2h tank .. also last question why dw vs 2h
Answering in order. I do about 5k DPS on average. The spec is really RNG based. It depends a good deal on getting procs and using cool downs at just the right time. However I have seen WWS links of folks pushing 7.5 k DPS with the spec and best in slot items. Against other classes, well that will depend on the quality of the players in your raid. For Commotion I range between top 1-3 to top 5 depending on the fight. This includes factors like movement and AoE. As for fine tuning the spec, if you do not have an unholy DK in the raid I’d recommend at least moving two points out of desecration and putting them into unholy. Any fight that requires movement will be cake with this.
As for 2h dps vs dw It really depends on play style. In the future, I believe blood will pull ahead due to weapon scaling in the next content expansion (Ulduar). However for now Unholy and DW are ‘the bees knees’ in terms of dps. There is just nothing else that can really compare.
Further there is some talk about 44/27 vs 32/39. The main difference between these specs is using frost strike vs death coil. Lets just do some quick figurative math though. FS will hit a good deal harder using a 2 hander and is considered a better RP dump as it does more damage, but ONLY using a 2h. Using dual wield, your main hand which is what determines the main damage from frost strike has a much lower damage range. For now death coil is a better runic power dump. In the future this is subject to change though for the same reasons as blood spec, as weapons improve so will white damage and damage range.
Finally, addressing the question of 2h vs dw for tanking. This is an easy one, NEVER use DW for tanking. You will take a great deal more damage due to the boss parrying your attacks. When the boss parries he automatically gains a free attack and the incoming damage comes quicker and more bursty. I think the math I read was something like 200-300% more damage than you would normally take? Even if you could get expertise capped while using DW… you’d have to socket everything to get it and it would really hurt your other stats.
made me lol.
Summoned a ghoul and then thought to yourself this could possibly be the best name ever. and then it actually WAS the best name ever!?
yap.
ITT: Complete list of prefixes and suffixes for DK pets.
List of Prefixes
Stone
Dirt
Blight
Corpse
Grave
Carrion
Skull
Bone
Crypt
Rib
Brain
Tomb
Rot
Gravel
Plague
Casket
Limb
Worm
Earth
Spine
PebbleList of Suffixes
Ravager
Muncher
Cruncher
Masher
Leaper
Grinder
Stalker
Gobbler
Feeder
Basher
Chewer
Ripper
Slicer
Gnaw
Flayer
Rumbler
Chomp
Breaker
Keeper
Crawler
Flayer
Commentary on wow default UI and custom UI design.
Default WoW UI, (src: wow forums)
It’s been a while since i’ve been asked about UI’s and the like but recently a guild mate of mine asked for a UI for his hunter alt.
In designing my own UI I first had to take apart the default UI and analyze what I thought was wrong with the default UI. Left is an image of the default UI courtesy of Nae <from Accounting> on Baelgun.
The UI has a few problems. Putting aside any aesthetic disagreements we have to take a look functionality. The first problem with the default UI is the way that the information being presented is displayed. The player, party, target and target of target frames are all organized in the upper left while chat is located in the lower left. Additionally abilities are listed along the bottum and right side of the screen.
By themselves the parts of a UI might make sense as an easy way to display information however in a raiding situation watching cool downs while trying to pay attention to a raid addon that deals with timing as well as player/pet/raid frames.
This default UI does not even include any standard raiding frames or omen, a threat addon. With the conventional UI there just is not room for any additional information to be displayed withought the player needing to view 100% of the screen all of the time. This was way too chaotic for me.
I had 3 main problems with it.
- The elements of the UI I cared about were simply too far apart to view at one time with ease.
- The UI itself didn’t really compliment its individual parts; even though each part of the UI performed its function, the way it displayed information on the screen it worked against itself.
- The UI took up far too much screen space.
To fix the problems I reorganized content to make the parts I needed the most, my character frame, target frame, and omen most visible and also aesthetically pleasing.
Sympa UIv3
Right is a copy of my UI. A quick explanation of the layout. Chat frames are left as they are not needed for immediacy in combat. All combat related information is displayed in a vertical column. Pet abilities followed by my abilities. Pet frame followed by player frame and omen immediately under it. Below omen is my target of target and target. The yellow bar below that is an addon called classtimers which monitors cool downs and debuffs you cast. The only debuffs I care about on a boss are the ones I need to cast so this is really helpful. Right of this column are my buffs and a custom LUA script Inside your grid folder head to the layoutlayout.lua file and use the following code for the same effect.
GridLayout:AddLayout(L["SYMPA"], {
[1] = { groupFilter = "1,2,3,4,5,WARRIOR,DRUID,WARLOCK,MAGE,ROGUE,PRIEST,SHAMAN,PALADIN,HUNTER,DEATHKNIGHT",
maxColumns = "1",
maxUnitsPerColumn = "25",
strictFiltering = true,
groupBy = "CLASS",
groupingOrder = "1,2,3,4,5,WARRIOR,DRUID,WARLOCK,MAGE,ROGUE,PRIEST,SHAMAN,PALADIN,HUNTER" ,
},
})
applied to grid. Grids layout is vertical, only showing groups 1-5 and grouped according to class. A list of addons used can be found here.
EPIC LINKS
- Download Sympa UIv3. Side note about this upload of the UI. Its a slightly older version and does not include class timers or the placement of the pet bar. I take 0 responsibility for assisting people in setting up this UI.
- Elitist Jerks UI thread.
- OMGphatloots.org. Great website filled with information about UI’s as well as discussion about thier functionality.
Below is a very summarized version of current hunter affairs for pve.
Quick list of info
Hit cap is 8%:
The conversion rate at level 80 is 32.78998947 hit rating to 1% to hit.
Level 83 boss mobs require 8% hit for us to not miss. There has been a great deal of theorycrafting about this on the EJ forums. If you have a space cow in raid you will need 7% to hit. You can read more here: EJ hit rating thread.
Cats and scorpids are best:
Scorpids are the top DPS pet for the moment because of the way scorpid poison is scaling with ap. A close second are cats. Cats are commonly considered the main raiding pet right now because of their rake ability. It scales better than all other abilities right now. Devilsaur / Spirit Beast / Wasp are close behind cats. Because cats are the top DPS pet there really is no reason to spec into the last point of the Beast Mastery talent tree. Unless your looking for cool points wandering around Ironforge. (Changing in the next patch, mouse over to see how).Blizzard is normalizing rake and scorpid poison. Hunters will have to choose a devilsaur if bm most likely although there is still speculation about how a readiness build will perform considering readiness will still affect rapid fire but not bestial wrath.
Talents
50/16/5
There are different variations on this spec, including switching points into focussed aim for more hit as part of a spec (as apposed to getting it from gear) as well as speccing into the last talent point in the BM tree. The different variations have little affect on play style but a great deal of affect on damage. Depending on what gear you have the talents will change.
50/21/0
This spec is fairly straight forward but can also be manipulated in the same ways, changing a few talent points around. THe main power behind this spec is readiness and manipulating cool downs. The idea ideally is to pop all cool downs asap. Once cool downs have subsided hit readiness and pop all cool downs again. Rinse and repeat for the fights duration. (Going to be nerfed in 3.0.8)
11/54/5
This is the typical marksman spec. There are theories that this can eventually beat BM in DPS but there is a ratio of Attack power needed. The attack power necessary is estimated at over 10,000.
THERE IS NO GOOD SURVIVAL SPEC. Thats right kids, at the moment, survival is crap. Therein I will not be posting a raiding survival spec. (Being buffed in 3.0.8 and may actually become the main raiding spec.)
FAQ on Talents.
• A quick bit about longevity and cobra strikes. Both talents are most effective at 1 talent point or 3.
• Piercing shots is really not that great a talent. We as a class scale poorly with armer pen now.
• Improved tracking’s %damage modifier has 0 effect on pets.
• Focused aim hit talents do not affect your pet’s hit % Your pets hit % is only affected from BM talents and the amount of hit the hunter has on gear.
Glyphs
Best glyphs are Steady shot, beastial wrath, improved aspect of the hawk and serpent sting. If you are marks, glyph of true shot aura is a good replacement for beastial wrath. My personal preference for beast mastery are, steady shot, beastial wrath and aspect of the hawk.
Shot Rotation
BM: Keep serpent sting up with hunter’s mark. Spam steady auto till your fingers bleed. Hit kill shot asap.
Marks: Keep up serpent sting and hunter’s mark. Spam steady auto untill serpent sting is about to run out – then use chimera shot. Chimera shot will refresh serpent sting and do damage based on how much damage serpent sting has already done. When improved steady shot procs, hit arcane or chimera shot.
Macros
When creating a macro use the ” ? ” icon so that the icon is replace with whatever is being used in the macro.
#showtooltip bestial wrath
/use 13
/use 14
/cast bestial wrath
/cast Call of the Wild
/cast rapid fire
/cast kill command
Uses all cooldowns if tapped twice. (use 13 and use 14 denote item slots 13 and 14 of your character, aka trinkets)
#showtooltip Steady Shot
/cast kill shot
/cast steady shot
/cast [target=pettarget,exists] Rabid
Spams steadyshot untill the boss reaches low enough health to use kill shot, then uses kill shot and resumes steady shot. The Rabid line will cast rabid only if your pet is alive and has a target*.
*Use this code for pet abilities so that your macros don’t hang up when your pet is dead or attacking a different target than you. If you just use /cast rabid when your pet is attacking another target or sitting passively next to you it will attack your target. This is not always the desired affect and can often get your pet killed if you have him next to your side and bad things are happening in melee.
#showtooltip
/cast [button:1] Aspect of the dragonHawk; [button:2]Aspect of the viper; [button:4]Aspect of the Beast; [button:5] Aspect of the Cheetah
1 button for all aspects. Requires a mouse with buttons. Left click AotDH, Right click AotV, Thumb button front AotC, Thumb button back AotB.
#showtooltip
/cast [combat] Mend pet
/cast [nocombat]Feed Pet
/use [pet:Gorilla] Mag'har Grainbread; [pet:Ravager] Smoked Talbuk Venison; [pet:Cat] Smoked Talbuk Venison;
Pet feed macro. In combat works as mend pet. Out of combat feeds pet designated pet class food.
/cast [button:1] Frost Trap; [button:2]Freezing Trap; [button:4]Snake Trap; [button:5] Explosive Trap
Aame deal as aspects, but with traps.
/cast [modifier:shift] Serpent Sting
/use 13
/use 14
/cast Call of the Wild
/cast [target=pettarget,exists] Bestial Wrath
/cast rapid fire
/cast kill command
/cast [target=pettarget,exists] Rabid
/cast kill shot
/cast steady shot
The super lazy horrible do everything for me macro. Pops all cooldowns as soon as they are up. Hold shift while spamming the macro to cast serpent sting.
EPIC LINKS
