He Suggested Abraham Lincoln and Napoleon Bonaparte .. one problem with Napoleon Bonaparte was that he died in 1821 and .. photography as we semi know it was only invented in 1820′s

So I searched for a high quality image of Abraham Lincoln and well it’s a bit tricky to find truly high quality photos of him I mean it is 150 odd years ago … but I settled on this image

(At least I hope it’s a photo and not a great painting in some strange black and white mode … charcoal for the rest of us possibly)

Making a few selections on bits and bobs and running it through a few filters at the end I came up with …

So in my own opinion it’s not bad … I’ve no idea what he looked like originally apart from his own description of himself which seems to be …

” If any personal description of me is thought desirable, it may be said, I am, in height, six feet, four inches, nearly; lean in flesh, weighing, on an average, one hundred and eighty pounds; dark complexion, with coarse black hair, and grey eyes — no other marks or brands recollected”

Abraham Lincoln . December 20, 1859 – Autobiography

Edit: I should add yes it’s got a bit of a cartoony feel to it / painting feel but I’m not sure if that’s a limitation of what I’m attempting to do with a low res photo or what. I’m not trying to actually edit the photos too much just to tweak the original lack of colour

So at Valérie-Anne’s suggestion I’m now trying to convert a Black and White photo of Audrey Hepburn into Colour

And a bit of conversion in a similar way to my previous post on Converting a Black and White Photo into Colour

And hey presto we get …

Once again the hair is causing me issues … so I pretty much didn’t touch it this time around … now … who to convert next … any suggestions ?

So I ended up playing with the converting of a black and white photo to colour (color for any american english people out there) in photoshop yesterday,

I’ve actually thought about doing it for ages but saw a link to a tutorial on it which turned out to be a dead link. Anyways I needed a decent Black and White photo (to start with anyways I’ve plans to convert a few old photos once I get the knack of things) I did a quick search and who could be more perfect to do than Google Image search for Marilyn Monroe. You’ve got colour and black and white photos so you’ve go something to base things on (also some really high res images which is nice)

Selected my photo .. and basically means selecting the various areas you want with the lasso tool (I used the polygonal lasso tool for it’s clicky goodness) add a slight feather to the selected area copy and paste as a new layer. Then up to Layers and Adjustment layer -> Hue/Saturation

Then make sure to tick use previous layer to create clipping mask

And hey presto .. it’s slightly pain staking cutting out the bits but so cool to start seeing the results once you start adjusting the Hue / Saturation levels ( make sure to tick colorize or you may be wondering why nothing is happening)

And so you start to see some results … my first looking something like Andy Warhol’s Marilyn Monroe … Second version appearing a bit more like a technicolor version but I’m preferring it.

And finally adding a vignette and a gradient mask onto the image and I got the result I wanted.

Hair seems to be have been the trickiest part of this for me and yes I’ve left it rough in a few places hope you like the tips (though maybe they could be a bit clearer)

And of course once you’ve got all the areas mapped out it’s quite handy to tweak any colours to your hearts content

Edit: Should add a video tutorial on this is available at Black and White to Colour Video obviously goes into more detail about extracting things ended up pretty much following the first few steps and go the inspiration for photo character from it as well

You can of course see more of his sillyness over on his facebook page Squishy

Its an old classic movie that I’ve not seen in quite some time so maybe with my cats help its on the cards again

Rather hastily done but ah well its the thought that counts

The worst thing about coming back from holidays where you shut off is the amount of catching up you have to do especially when you’re a freelancer but thats going somewhere else that I don’t want to go with this post and a post on Fes in Morocco and my trip will be coming up shortly… So without further ado here we have my latest contribution to the Squishy The Cat / Catatar dynasty meet Borcat:D

One thing I hate is when a website goes to all the trouble of making up a nice design (or even just grabbing a template and putting it up) and then they don’t go ahead and create a Favicon or worse still in my mind they use the default one that came with the CMS they are using. ARGH!

So what can you do … well really you’ve no excuse there are a multitude of free online favicon generators out there. I however prefer being able to do things from within my trusty version of Photoshop. I’m running Photoshop CS3 and thankfully there is a nice little plugin for it from the lovely people over at Telegraphics. They have versions of the plugin for both windows and Mac (I’m a Mac) and they also have versions or CS3 and CS4.

So install the plugin .. create your 32×32 pixel image and away you go Click the Save As button from the Format Dropdown choose ICO (Windows Icon) and I normally select Standard format.

Of course you can just go ahead and use PNG graphics for your icons I do believe however you’ll end up no doubt having issues with compatability and this method described here has just worked for me.

All this sounding like too much hastle to you ? well there are loads of free online generators out there

Take this one over at Dynamicdrive Favicon Generator or HTML Kit Favicon Generator

Lastly I might add in order for this favicon to appear on the tab / URL area you’ll need to let browsers know it exists. I recommend uploading it to the root webfolder / on your website calling it favicon.ico for consistancy not to mention some browsers automagically pick up the name and search for it, and you’ll want to add in a small snippet of code to all your webpages

<link rel="shortcut icon" type="image/x-icon" href="/favicon.ico" />

And finally some Favicons I’ve created (not to mention the one you’re hopefully seeing above)

So once again we’ve saved the world .. well no … its not made that much difference on the greater scale of things but its a nice little finishing touch to your sites and something you or your customers can kinda go oooh thats cool about

I installed the Hybrid Theme Framework the other day and must admit it took me a little while to realise what was going on with it. Once I did however I immediately threw the man the 25 quid subscription fee for access to the forums. Why Pay ? well he’s putting a lot of work into it so he might as well get something back. 25 dollars equates to 17 euro so I’m happy to help and getting support to questions in a timely manner is a major plus for me (he’s rather active on the forums on there as he should be)

So you’re here and you’re probably seeing blue .. a whole lot of blue. Don’t worry it was intentional The design is based on my work site though obviously different colours. (I’ve another site design / branding to do with the same style as this shortly for another personal project … consistency and code re-use should be good). I had wanted to do some retro style design that I was tinkering and playing around with in my head on here but in the end I said screw it. The logo is similar to an earlier version I had on the site with slightly updated colours.

Forbairt Site Design and Colours

So why not let me know what you think add a comment give some feedback. As with most of my personal projects its going to be a Work in Progress.

Pardon the pun of my post title but I thought it appropriate after staring at construction terminalogy the last few days.

So I was approached to do a simple enough move of hosting and a few updates on a website for Deeside Building and this turned into them changing branding / company to Devine Building. They were happy enough with their existing logo and colours but I made a few suggestions and one thing led to another.

Take their old site and see what I changed.

Now I immediately didn’t like the site. I’m not getting a warm vibe from it .. I’m not getting any professional edge to it. I’m not getting hit with what they do apart from the graphic with the keywords. This would have been fine for me a few years back but once you start to consider what you’re trying to do .. impress end users you’ve to change the way you think slightly.

The site had links to the Recent Projects all listed on the one page so the first thing to do was a bit of a rethink of their branding. Now I think their signage works perfectly well on a construction site but once you move over to a computer I found their colours strange to say the least. I suggested toning it down. Now with sites where you’re trying to highlight a product / photo I find that black is a good colour it works well with warm images. ( Take Safari Club as an example of this ). So keeping their logo (slightly updated with the DEVINE wording) I put it against a black background and changed it to white. The front page of the site while linking to Recent Projects / Available Services / Health and Safety .. wasn’t really doing anything and just adding in an extra click to get to what the customer really wants to see the completed projects. So I opted to include a random display of their recent projects on the front page. The other options are still present in the menu so you’re not really losing anything but we’re now showing some high class construction work on the sites front page. I removed the generic house building image as well from the front page and hey presto you’ve got what I think is a rather nice clean and straight to the point website.

The projects were given individual pages. I ended up creating some banner images … got some text for the projects .. added in some nice javascript popup effects for the photos (and some touch up work with the photos removing artifacts in them that take away from the image .. changing the levels on the images and so on)

You can see an example re the artifacts here ( I do love photoshop )

And so to the final design. Simple, clean and hopefully to the point and highlighting their construction work.

My poor cat is all I’ll say he has no choice in the movie posters he appears in. This one is quite possibly leads to questions of cruelty to animals but please note no cats were harmed in the making of this poster (though I was clawed once or twice afterwards)

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