*Whoops! - I’ve realised that my blog is loading painfully, extremely slowly these days. I think it’s a way of my host to remind me of my annual webhosting payment 
I couldn’t stop playing around with Photoshop after reading a few tutorials on some magazines at a bookstore the other day 
special thanks to the Digital Camera magazine for sharing an excellent tutorial by Tim Shelbourne. I experimented with his technique in one of my older posts, Digital Art, on the Mr Potato photo. Here are two more examples - just random photos I’ve dug out from my floral macro archives. You can click on the photos to view the enlarged version.
Pink Rose - This is one of my personal favourite because I love the darkened outlines of the petals after the post-processing step. I have intentionally blurred and darkened the background, as well as faded some less important parts of the petals, while shading the illuminated parts of the rose. Final touches include using the Diffused Glow filter. There’s a distracting glow of pink at the bottom center of the photo, and I’ve tried to photoshop it out but as you can see, a tiny bit of it still remains. At least it’s better than nothing!
Yellow Flower - I have mixed feelings for this photo, since I find the background having a more ‘painted over’ look than the foreground. The increased contrast around the foreground object is a turnoff for me, so I’ve tried to tune it down but I couldn’t shake the feeling off. What I adore is the appearance of the leaves at both sides of the photo 
in the end the background looks more interesting than the foreground itself, this is weird.
For Wordpress’ Hardcore fans…
Looks like the next release of Wordpress, namely WP 2.6, will come packaged with a Wiki-esque feature, which is going to be extremely useful to blog administrators who have multiple Wordpress users and are big control freaks who want to keep being posted on recent article edits. Here is a screenshot:
Great colours! - The designing team used soft red and green as backgrounds for edited paragraphs, and uses a darker shade of the same colours for edited text. Attention grabbing but not too flash, I must say this is brilliant!
Restore button - It wouldn’t make any sense if the new features comes without enabling the blog administrator to restore older versions of the edited entry. User interface is very straight forward, and not as confusing as the controversial restyling of the post page
7 responses to My Itchy Fingers
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May 23rd, 2008 at 5:05 pm
no images load either - I think you should probably move hosts - its ridiculously slow!
Check out Han’s last blog post: Summer Ball dress
May 23rd, 2008 at 5:53 pm
your photos are actually as nice before editing. the first one (edited) is actually quite nice. the dreamy feeling because of the blur. though the sharp lines at the inside of the flower spoils it a bit. but still, it looks nice with the higher contrast (is it contrast?)
and you’re tempting me with wordpress. wanna see how it works like for myself.
Check out jason’s last blog post: The Mindef March
May 23rd, 2008 at 9:29 pm
@Han
it’s the cheapest local host around and more importantly, my parents are extremely afraid of divulging sensitive credit card information to foreign hosts, despite my repeated reassurance that they’re secure. Oh great. When I get MY own credit card, I’m shifting host! Heheh.
I wish I can
@jason
Thanks. That photo resembles a studio shoot to me, lol! Maybe because it’s the dark background and the brightly lit subject. I think I’ve overdone the outlines, whooops!
If you want to really enjoy Wordpress, getting a self-hosted one is always the best
since it gives you the most freedom over your blog!
May 25th, 2008 at 7:29 pm
WP 2.6? Urggh… I hope I would not ruin my blog again this time!
Check out saffa’s last blog post: Untitled
May 25th, 2008 at 11:24 pm
The 2 pictures, you’ve made them look like a real painting! Great work.
I seriously envy your free time
May 25th, 2008 at 11:40 pm
@saffa
WP2.6 is just a planned future release - there’s no solid details about it so far, except for the post revisions features. Did the upgrading process to WP2.5 screwed up your blog? Because it sounds so in your comment… I hope everything is fine now!
@NoktahHitam
Thanks! Actually I love the first one more, the second one is quite crappy, lol! The second photo already suffers from oversaturation (an artefact of my Pentax camera)… so yep by further pumping the saturation made the painting effect look too surreal.
May 28th, 2008 at 8:12 am
IPhotoshop is such a beauty isn’t it?? You can do so much to a picture that you never knew could be done. I use a combination of Photoshop and Adobe Lightroom. It’s a really great program for photos if you ever get the chance to explore that program, it’s greatly recommended.
Wow… 2.6 is coming out so soon??? I think I would love the wiki feature! Whoever thought of incorporating that is a genius.
Check out Destiny’s last blog post: The Return to Redstreak