Oh well, not really. :-)

This blog is simply to illustrate what I blogged earlier on Better Colour via Black and White.

In this instance the Black and White was created using Calculations, namely using the Green and Blue channels, in that order, and blending them using the Multiply Mode.

And a copy of the resulting Alpha Channel is pasted as a new layer above the image with a Luminosity blending mode, with some adjustments to Opacity.

Now this particular Calculation and Blending mode seems to work best with brown coloured subjects like this wood carving and rocks.

It seems to give an effect similar to the Dragan effect, but not exactly, and I do not know ...

This one was buried in digital dust somewhere in my archives until recently.

The morale of the story is there may be gems hidden somewhere on your harddisk.

But it surely is a tedious task to go through ALL the pictures in every sector of every harddisk.

Lightroom is a pretty good tool to do this, especially when browsing by date of shoot. It does bring back memories of those days too.

Also I think we should not be too hasty to delete pictures especially at capture, for maybe two reasons.

One of course is that you may find a use of the picture, or a part of it, in some other context later.

And secondly, perhaps more importantly, is to know why the picture didn't turn up as you had earlier seen it in your mind's eye, before you release that shutter.

This image may or may not exist in reality.

The left and right windows are, respectively, the left and right mirror reflections of the centre window.

It is a very simply manipulation, but only so as it is digital.

It allows me a more effective presentation of the original picture. And if the original have been less than 3MP, now you have three times as many pixels.

A designer still have the single window if he needs to, but it looks better in a row of three almost identical windows.

:-)

This is a stray mother cat with her kittens in the grass.

A juvenile tom cat was nearby, and she was extra vigilant. Here she was caught moving towards the tom cat, which later resulted in a snarling cat fight, and the tom cat chased away eventually.

The kittens in the meantime were mauling my camera bag which was left on the ground.

But the real intent in this blog is to say that I really liked the 3D effect of the mother cat, and the side illumination from the early morning sun.

It was captured at f2.8, and the focus is just on the foreground, namely the forward part of the cat's head, going soft for the rest, and very sharp also for the grasses in the foreground.

If you download the picture and see it at full size, you can even see and ...

Yeah! I finally got an image accepted for Assignment!

This image was created via layering multiple exposures of a clock ticking, with each shot taken 1 sec apart, coinciding exactly with the second hand arriving at the mark.

These multiple images were then layered in Photoshop with each succeeding layer's opacity a constant fraction less than the previous one. In this case I think I used 75%.

But such layering would not work if not for Photoshop CS3 new Auto Align Layers by Content, which can be found under the Edit menu.

For even when the camera was on a tripod, there are minute shifts between shots, which makes sharp edges like those of the numeral's, fuzzy. I suppose this would not happen if you had used a remote control, but I was firing off the shutter every ...