Monday, 26th February, 2007

Dreamspace

random dream

Really odd one last night. Not one of my usual vivid epics — just a small snippet that I remember out of what I presume must have been a lot longer, seeing as I've got that strange "been asleep, yet now knackered because my brain was working too hard dreaming" thing going on this morning.

Incidentally, when I woke up just before 7am, it was light already I can't help but feel that there's a kind of "end of the tunnel light" thing going on.

But yeah, dream ... I was in my bedroom, except it wasn't my bedroom. It was kinda a little like my bedroom when I was a kid, but lighter — lots of white and stuff. A bit like if you took my kid bedroom and mushed it together with my adult bedroom in some kind of Dr. Frankenstein meets Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen monstrosity.

And there was someone else there, but I'm not sure who.

Anyway, there were two feelings that I can remember — firstly that of a sense of belonging. Or something like that — something along the lines of having been in that room forever, feeling like it was a part of me (or vice versa), and the impending notion that I was going to have to leave it soon which would be weird.

And secondly, a sense of inactivity — like I'd spent too long just lying in that room doing sod all, day after day, whilst all the time the things I should have been doing mounted up.

I think it's pretty obvious (to me) what all that means. I think I need to go to B&Q this morning and buy tubs of Polyfilla and paint.

...

Before I do that though, I just wanted to mark this day somehow. It feels like I've been waiting for today for ever. For about seven months now I've felt like I've been banging my head against a brick wall — never quite being able to achieve anything, always held back.

Things around me have been gradually collapsing. The Mountain Of Stuff™ has seemed impenetrable sometimes. Each time I've attempted to make inroads into it, I've only ever scratched the surface before hitting an empasse.

I've been able to picture a space where things should be all along, but the distance between 'them' and 'these', and 'then' and 'now' has always been too big.

Sorry — I realise this makes no sense. It's not really supposed to make any sense to be honest. Just take it as the frustrated moanings of a mid-thirties wotsit who finds things a little bit too much sometimes.

I'm rather fond (as you probably know) of analogies. You know those 'tile' games where you have to rearrange the tiles by sliding them around a little grid until they make a nice picture?

Things have felt like that, except there's not been a blank space into which to slide the tiles.

...

Right. B&Q...

Siobhan's Top Decorating Tips (1)

painting decoration house

Not content with being as boring as watching paint dry, I've decided to go one step further and actually blog about it.

You know, the life of a modern-day transvestite isn't all frocks, strops and egoes. Sometimes, within the general day-to-day mundanity of looking fabulous and throwing tantrums even we have to put on our best Linda Barker face and muck-in with the rest of yous in that Ever So British Pastime™ of 'decorating'.

Maybe it's because our hovels are pigsties, or maybe it's because the new shoes we bought don't go with the wallpaper (or something), but popping the old lid of a paint tin is something that gets to us all in the end.

Even Princesses.

Naturally, being a lover of shared-knowledge, it would be wrong of me to keep all the trade secrets I've learned over the years to myself. So, in the spirit of Open Source Decorating™, here's a little tidbit of advice...

Do you, like me, have a passion for clean white walls? Do you, like me, find yourself daunted by the prospect of slapping a roller caked in white emulsion across your plasterwork only to forget which bits you have and haven't done?

Don't waste money on fancy "Pink to White" paints from your local DIY store. Just smoke twenty a day for three years without laying one finger on a paintbrush and you'll be able to spot the 'not done' bits no problem.

Siobhan's Top Decorating Tips (2)

random doofus

Tie your hair back properly before you start wielding paintbrushes around the place.

*doh*

Weirdos. All of you

Bokeh!

howto secondlife photography photoshop

A short HOWTO involving the Lens Blur filter in PhotoShop and Second Life snapshots...

Bokeh is, according to Wikipedia:

a photographic term referring to out-of-focus (OOF) areas in a photographic image.

(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bokeh)

...but for the sake of simplicity, let's just restrict discussions to "things being blurry in a picture"

Vint Falken recently wrote a tutorial about adding depth to a SL snapshot using Gaussian Blur which prompted me to dig out a little technique I stumbled on a while back that combined PhotoShop's Lens Blur filter with 'Depth' snapshots.

I'm never sure whether or not people are aware that there are three different types of snapshot you can take in Second Life — aside from the "Hard Disk", "Postcard" and "Texture" ones...

As well as the standard "Colour" one, you can also take one that creates handy mattes for fiddly selections, and one that renders a greyscale image with tones based on how far away from the camera things are. Also, using the "Keep open after saving", you can make sure that all of the snapshots match up exactly.

Here — here's three I took the other day...

(Colours)

(Object Mattes¹)

(Depth)

The first thing you might notice is that there's something weird going on in the 'Depth' snapshot — my hair is borked. I think this is because it's transparent, or it's got an alpha channel (or something). Not to worry though — the object matte will help us

The Lens Blur filter in Photoshop basically takes a greyscale 'map', and blurs things based on how light they are. You specify what 'focal point' you want, and then anything darker or lighter than that point will get blurred.

In the case above, I was me to be in focus, and the background blurred, so I can use the depth snapthot as a map for the filter.

First though, I need to tidy it up a bit — startig with my hair. I copy all three snapshots into one image (so they're on different layers)...

...then I start the fiddly process of using the magic wand on the Object Matte layer to select all the bits of my hair that the Depth layer has missed.

Go marching ants! Go!

(Sorry )

OK, with that all selected, I hide the layer, flip to the Depth layer and fill the still-selected shape with the same shade of grey as the rest of my head.

That's pretty-much ready to be used as a blur-map, but what I've found is that if you tweak it a bit, it'll end up looking better. I want to get a bit of blur going on at my feet — to heighten the whole effect — but even if I mess around with Curves and Levels I can't quite get there.

So I use the Dodge tool to manually lighten parts of the layer after adjusting the Levels...

Because things that are lighter will get more blurred, what I've effectively done is force PhotoShop to blur my legs more. You can also see how much more I've lightened the objects in the background.

To actually use that map with the filter, I need to create a new Channel and paste that layer into it.

(I saved the selection of my hair previously — you can never be sure when you're going to hit Deselect by mistake)

Then I fire up the Lens Blur filter (Filter → Blur... → Lens Blur), and select my "Depth" channel as the map to use...

The actual settings to use, I find, are just a matter of personal taste and trial-and-error. For a more blurred effect, knock the "radius" up as far as you dare. To simulate more grain, whack up the noise. But as long as the greyscale map has enough definition in it, you should be alright.

Then it's just a matter of obsessively tweaking the curves and levels, applying too many Lighting Effects filters, hand-painting some shadows in, and you're done

One little tip — if you're going to hand-paint shadows in (I do it on a seperate layer), do it before applying the Lens Blur. Otherwise the lovely ready-made mattes that you have at your disposal will be bloody useless and you'll end up with weirdness around the edges of things...

I should have mentioned that earlier...

¹ Here's a weird thing — see the funny squares in the top left of that picture? They're a HUD of mine, even though I've got the "Show HUD objects in snapshot" option turned off. Must badger Torley about that one...