GIP

[ria_oaks]

Shiny new icon. Seems fitting after last night's ep... Credit to merry_holdwine.

I wish I could learn to make graphics better... I was just fiddling with a picture of Mahone trying to make it into an icon, but don't know how to make it nice. This is what I ended up with:



Credit for the cap goes to elizabethb.

I dunno, it's just boring and plain... I need to go do some icon tutorials or something.

Meh, I'm bored and lazy... sitting in living room watching SVU and fooling around on computer. I should prepare for my presentation tomorrow... plus House in a little over an hour. :) And new ep of SVU later.

2 weeks today until I come home. :) Yay!

Comments

[bk635.livejournal.com]

He's still alive. I swear.


...D:

[ria-oaks.livejournal.com]

We can hope. :) Maybe if the GA spinoff fails (hah) he'll come back... maybe they just killed the guard and took him to SONA! They could easily write it that way if they wanted to.

Though I suppose that if he had to go, that was a pretty fitting way... smiling at the men about to kill him. Nice.

[bk635.livejournal.com]

The Mahone one needs some kind of emo text in the lower left. Possibly white font; very cursive.

[ria-oaks.livejournal.com]

Yeah, that's what I figure. XD But I suck at getting text to look good... maybe just need to find the right font.

[bk635.livejournal.com]

Give me the emo text and I can take it into Photoshop and see what I can do. No guarantees; busy right now.

[ria-oaks.livejournal.com]

Heh, I'll have to think of something... might just use his name. ^^ And sure, thanks, if you can do anything that'd make it look cool, that'd be nice. I don't care much, but I just wish I was better at graphics. I get jealous when I see the gorgeous icons and wallpapers people make. ^^ Guess I need to do some proper Photoshop tutorials and whatnot.

[bk635.livejournal.com]

I'd take a class. I tried online tutorials and such and found them to be pretty vague.

[ria-oaks.livejournal.com]

Yeah... I might consider that. Then again, I get carpal tunnel pretty quickly from doing this stuff, not to mention a stiff neck, so I probably shouldn't do it much. Plus I'm using an old version of Photoshop (PS 6), since we got a copy of it free years ago for some (legal, afaik) reason or another.

[bk635.livejournal.com]

What you could try, is getting a full-back executive chair. It allows you to lean back and relaxe all of your back muscles. With a regular computer chair, everything from your shoulder blades and up is unsupported. I know that your stiff neck is probably caused by medications, but the support could really help.

I think I have Photoshop 7.. I wonder what version they're up to now..

[ria-oaks.livejournal.com]

Yeah, that'd be nice... I have a fairly decent chair at home which supports my entire back, at least. Here it's just a crappy plastic thing, though. ^^; I dunno, I've had neck and back pain for several years now... doesn't help that I'm looking down at my screen, too.

There's one above PS 7, afaik. Photoshop CS, I believe.

Fiddling with those Farscape screencaps I meant to post months ago... I understand some of the basic functions of PS and enjoy fiddling with different things, but really don't know what I'm doing. ^^ Here's an example...

Original:

(http://imageshack.us)

Initial cleaned up version:

(http://imageshack.us)

And version that I just did by fiddling with the cleaned up one...

(http://imageshack.us)

All done by using pretty damned basic functions - the brightness/contrast adjustment, and in the 3rd version I duplicated the layer and set it to screen, then fiddled a bit more with the brightness/contrast. Between those two functions, I find most pictures look a lot better...

[bk635.livejournal.com]

This kind of chair?

I find that the middle image looks best. The original isn't bad either. The last one is way too bright though; it looks like they're standing in front of a search light or something.

[ria-oaks.livejournal.com]

Hmm, really? I think the second one's too... pink. And dark. I dunno, I like the third one because it's so light, and because I like how the colours look and how strong the contrast is, though I can see how it would look too washed out. I don't know, I'm no good at judging my own stuff. ^^

A chair like that'd be fantasic... nah, mine's no where near that good.

[ria-oaks.livejournal.com]

How bout this?

Original:

(http://imageshack.us)

Cleaned up:

(http://imageshack.us)

And just fiddled with... again, pretty bright. And created a blue overlay layer which increased the...blueness.

(http://imageshack.us)\

Can you tell I'm trying to avoid going to bed? XD

[bk635.livejournal.com]

Middle one is again, better. The original looks like they're in a dark room. The third one looks like they're in a brightly lit room, but it also doesn't look like they're radioactive, like in the third picture of the first set. But even still, in the last one you can see some purple developing and the white undershirt losing its detail. You can also start seeing some dithering in the background (especially).

Make sure you save these things as png or bmp because jpgs are garbage. They compress the image a lot and the quality loss can be quite noticeable. I'm not sure if some of the faults in that third image are due to too much brightness or jpg conversion.

And now that you mention it, yes, I can tell. :p

[ria-oaks.livejournal.com]

Hmm... I dunno. Yeah, the middle one is better in terms of looking realistic, but I like the third one because I was trying to make it look more artistic and pretty. :) It does start getting too washed out, though, yeah.

Woops. ^^; Yeah, I've been saving them as jpgs... damn. Habit, I guess. I'll go for pngs from now on.

*procrastinates some more*

(http://imageshack.us)

Icon fun yay. Meh, it's not very good, but whatever. XD ... ...I should go to bed.