chiiyo

Actually this came from the Film Vs Digital thread but I opened a new topic because there's a lot to talk about here.M^E, would you like to share your experiences?For me, I took darkroom techniques when I was 15, and we learnt how to develop our own black and white films, as well as print them. My darkroom techniques are a little rusty, but what you need for a black and white darkroom is a place that is1. Air-conditioned, or similarly temperature-controllable, because the chemicals need to be at a certain temperature.2. Dark. Duh. No white light should be allowed, and for Black and White printing only Infra-Red light can be present. Not just any red bulb, but an Infra-Red bulb.3. Hopefully with a sink and running water.4. Some kind of timer, maybe something that ticks loudly? A clock might not be very visible under the infra-red light.5. Maybe a humidity controller. Dehumidifier is essential in humid areas like Singapore!6. Radio if you work alone in the darkroom most of the time, I find it eerie to work in silence...7. Fridge would be good, to store ice or something in bringing down the temperature of chemicals.8. A line or something to hang the prints and film to dry.The equipment you need in a black and white darkroom,1. Thermometer, to measure the temperatures of the chemicals.2. At least three large rectangular shallow pans, to agitate the prints when developing.3. Tweezers, big ones with rubber grips at the end to hold the prints.4. Clips with padded ends to hang the prints and film5. Darkbag for transferring the film to the film developing container.6. Film developing container (I don't know the actual name, it's like a small bucket that you put the spool of film in and then you pour the chemicals and you agitate...)7. Film spools 8. Film picker (to get the end of the film from the film roll out)9. Enlarger (enables you to "enlarge" the image on the film to a suitable large size to print on paper by projecting light through it and adjusting the distance between the film and the paper)10. Photographic paper (black and white), some brands are Ilford, Kodak, comes in different sizes, surfaces, textures. Keep in a dark place when not in use. If exposed to light you might as well throw it away or use it to train your chemical skills...11. Chemicals. Two sets of chemicals, one for film, one for paper. Both sets include a Developer, a Stopbath, and a Fixer. The Developer sets off chemical reactions in the film or paper and you can see your "image" appear on the paper or film. The Stopbath stops the chemical reactions so you won't have overdevelopment, and the Fixer fixes the image on the paper.12. Of course, some black and white roll that you have shot (though you can play around with objects with the enlarger first...) Be sure to get the true black and white film roll, not the C-41 ones, which have to be developed by the "colour film" development that hopefully M^E will talk about.... Will talk about procedures later. still have homework to do. Please add on whatever you think is necessary, my darkroom is a bit rusty and this is all off the top of my head and what I remember from my two years of being darkroom i/c.

(M^E, I'll set up another post about the whole self-development thing, it's a bit off-topic... besides, we NEED to populate the photography board. It's looking a little pitiful right now... And... =_=. I don't live in Japan ( I WISH!), I live in Singapore. I'm a chinese who loves the japanese culture, that's all...) Wow! Now that's really amazing... O_o. Imagine if you had taken it with a 35mm camera! It'll be almost one-to-one! But yeah, digital would definitely be better in your case, especially if you only publish on the web. But is the colour correct? I mean, miniatures... must be important to have the right colour and stuff right? How do you control the lighting? Do you have a studio set-up, or just amateur shots? I want to see! Is that really true?? O_o. Anyone thinks otherwise? I don't think film people necessary have to be more "artistic". I mean, Greg Gorman is a digital man, so are a lot of professional photographers... (though I don't really like Greg Gorman's work, but hey, he's the one making the big bucks, who am I to say he's not good?) Yes, I totally agree with that. I had fully explored the option of going digital before turning around and going back to the basics instead. I don't hate digital, in fact I find it rather cool, and will pick it up someday... when i have the extra cash, but for right now, film is the way to go for me. What I am not so happy about are people who pick up a powerful digital professional camera and then think that they are so pro at taking pictures, but their pictures have all been exposure-adjusted, background-cut-out, cropped and edited in photoshop. *snorts* That's not a good photographer, that's a mighty good graphic manipulator. People who think like that should pick up a medium format camera or a large format camera! I myself, I know I'm really not that good. Always better to be humble in this case.

Hmm. If that's that I will consider buying SimCity 4000, to play during the holidays, now that they're coming up. I need a game in this machine, totally no games on my mac at all... O_o. Now to find a place that will sell me the mac version... Maybe the AppleCentre... *muse*I didn't like the Sims because everytime my characters were stressed out I got even more stressed out. Like. Ugh. >_< Didn't like a game that made me feel stressed out so often, so stopped playing it. I am kinda interested in The Sims 2, can anyone elaborate on the gameplay and stuff?

Oh wow! That's more than I'll ever be, really. Yeah! Someone out there who loves film even more than I do!I can't believe you have your own colour enlarger and mini development lab! That's like how cool? Must be really expensive... I was wondering about getting my own colour film developer and stuff, but the costs of getting and maintaining it is like O_o. too much for me. I used to do black and white photography, and I know what you mean by seeing the picture fade in on that piece of blank paper. I love my hours spent in the darkroom, developing film, and getting that exposure of that print just right, hanging the papers up after that. I really miss that... *muse*Any good advice on how to get started on doing my own films and prints? I know the basics for black and white photography but O_o at colour.

Wow. $200? I handsew most of my costumes so I don't think I can sell them, I still have most of them with me. Sometimes I cosplay the same character for some last-minute cosplay so the costumes are very handy. I don't usually cosplay very popular characters though, don't think anyone would want to buy my costumes... O-o. I can sew kimonos quite well though, thinking of making some and selling for a side-hobby.

*grabs Photoshop CS manual**coughs* According to the manual, the changes for CS are-Enhanced File Browser (basically the ability to flag a picture, and edit the metadata of the picture through File Browser, oh, and perform batch procedures without opening the pictures)-Customisable keyboard shortcuts-Be able to create slide shows and pdf presentations (you can bind multiple files into a single, multi page PDF)-Can save your editing history onto an external log file or onto the metadata of a file-Filter Gallery, where you can see the effects of all filters on your object, and you can see layered filters without implementing them-Can build your own script for shortcuts and repetitive tasks-Customisable Help menu-Better RAW plugin (this one is really handy for photographers)-16-bit editing-Simulate photo filters (this is REALLY useful for me)-Shadow/Highlight command, Match Color command, Replace Color command.-New Lens Blur filter-Picture Package, which makes combining different images (for output I'm supposing) easy.-Editable text can be placed on a path and in a shape-Large document support (up to 300,000 x 300,000 pixels and 54 channels)-Create non-square documents (for video)-Presets for creating images for video-Ability to export layers easily to files.I actually bought the program and read the manual when I first bought it, so a lot of what was new didn't occur to me as new when I used it. Half the time I don't know whether a feature is new or not... Just use!Although, to be honest, if I hadn't gone to look it up in the manual, I also didn't remember a lot of the new features. Now that I've typed them out... O_o. Will be using some of them soon.I think it's more of improving the experience for three types of users: Photographers, Graphic Designers and Video Editors. And a lot of streamlining to make things faster, as well as giving more control over in dealing with both the pictures and the actual program.A lot of it is not what you would use from day to day, but I still think it's a good upgrade.

I usually don't like to post one-liners, but really. Wow. My goodness, this game sounds terrific and hard to learn at the same time, because it's both flexible and too flexible... O_o. I'll post it on my blog and see whether any of my good friends would want to try it out.But yeah. Great post. Just wow. O_o.

Ooh. I'm a big SimCity fan. I played the first SimCity (on a floppy), and then I played both SimCity 2000 and 3000. I also played SimTower and a lot of other games in the Sim series. I like most of them, but strangely enough the one game that the Sim range is famous for, The Sims, is the one I dislike...Has anyone played SimCity 4000 yet? Is it fun? I keep wondering whether I should buy it, since a Mac version has been out for some time...

Hmm. Was 14? Bought Idiot's Guide to HTML 4 because I couldn't find the Dummies version. Read the entire book, practised as much as possible. I still have the book around, it's quite old already, but I hardly use it unless it's something I haven't typed for a long time, like frames or something. What I did pick up pretty recently was CSS. CSS wasn't really supported across the board until like 3 or 4 years ago?and I didn't bother to buy a book, so I went to places like webmonkey.com and really scrutinised other people's codes. I can't say I've mastered CSS, but enough to make a decent website...Now I'm trying to understand XHTML... anyone has a good site to recommend?

With the digital photography rapidly taking over film photography, which camp do you belong to? There are those who use digital cameras and scoff at film, and there are those who straddle the two, using both technologies, appreciating both camps, and of course, there are the "old hardies" who cling onto film. Give your opinion about what you believe in, and the experiences you have had with your chosen media...For me, I'm a stoid film user. I have a fully manual 35mm SLR camera, with several prime lenses. In my university photography club, I'm one of the only few who still uses film, not to mention a manual camera. I like to shoot in film because correct colour rendering is important for me, especially when it comes to skin tones. There's just some reassurance that if I ever screw up my digital copies of my photos, I still have the original film (like how I just realised I lost the scans for the last two rolls of film I shot... but fortunately I can always go and rescan them).But I also like to scan my film in, and digitally manipulate them before I send them off to print. I know there are a lot of digital camera users who don't like to print photos, but for me it's quite important to have several copies of my photos. Other reasons why I stick to film... Grain instead of pixels. The ability to choose between normal colour film, black and whites, and slides. The enforced discipline that a film roll offers, because I can't just shoot ten shots, move into a dark place, and change the ISO, my ISO is fixed for 36 shots, and so I have to work around it. Often I find that working around things creates more creativity than having all the options laid out. Also I try to make every shot count (don't really like to bracket), because it costs money to get the film developed. (I am looking into buying a professional dedicated film scanner with my friend so we can save on the film scanning costs.)How about you guys? I know a lot of you have cameras (from the other camera topic) so share your opinions and insights!

I thought the topic is Old School games? O-o. Why is FFVII there??My contribution: SUPER MARIO! On the gameboy. and Tetris.I don't know how big gameboy was in other parts of the world, but when I was young that was all I played. Everyday I'd play super mario, over and over again, trying to get to the last stage... stage 12 I think. I don't think I ever made it there though.Nowadays gameboys are so cool. With colour, and the ability to fold into a smaller shape... (veering off-topic)How about text-based games? Back when we were still using BBS instead of the WWW there used to be text-based turn-based strategy games? I remember my elder sister playing those, I was still too young to understand how they worked. I still have a lot of games on 5 and a quarter inch floppy diskettes. Don't know why I still keep them around, since the computer that had a 5 and a quarter inch floppy drive is like.. dead and defunct for a long time now...I even have the first Sim City. on a floppy.

Ah... *rolls up sleeves* This is a topic I would be able to post a lot... considering my fellow japanese cultural club mates are thinking of naming me the most "otaku" around.I've watched a lot of anime... Been watching anime since... 5... 6 years ago? I love the medium, although sometimes I think the manga is better than the animated version (especially for all CLAMP anime, like Cardcaptor Sakura and Chobits, the manga is much better than the anime).Currently I have quite a few "favourite" animes. I would watch ANYTHING done by Makoto Shinkai (he did Hoshi no Koe, and the recent Beyond The Clouds), his work is exquisite and has such a depth and breadth to the plot, art, story as well as music, as do Hayao Miyazaki (he did Howl's Moving Castle, Spirited Away, Princess Mononoke). I love light-hearted funny animes, like Full Metal Panic Fumoffu, Yakitake Ja-Pan, School Rumble, Kyou Kara Maou etc. Anime that have a very interesting plot that draws me in are favourites too, stuff like the short animated clip Comedy, Kite, Uta-Kata. Cool animes like Bleach, Initial D, Shura No Toki, Samurai Champloo. I'm a big fan of preWWII Japan, so shows like Peacemaker Kurogane and Rurouni Kenshin are a few of my favourites...Yeah. A lot of anime. I tend to know the newer animes better than the older animes. I've not watched Naruto, Inu Yasha or Hellsing. I have watched Full Metal Alchemist though, as well as NGE and Trigun. I just watched a few random episodes of One Piece today and decided I like it. *grin* Oh, and one of my biggest fandoms is Prince of Tennis.I cosplay too! Anyone else here cosplays?

Actually, if so I would count Linux out, because as far as I know, Microsoft does not have Linux versions of their products. There is a Mac version of Microsoft Office, which consists of Word, Excel, Powerpoint and Entourage, oh and MSN Messenger. And of course, iTunes comes with the Mac operating system. Hmm. Then I think I'll recommend two routes for you. One: Buy a Mac. From your usage I think maybe the mac mini might fit your bill. It's the cheapest mac around, and basically you have to buy your own keyboard, mouse and screen to go with it. It will run Photoshop, Office and iTunes comfortably enough, because the Mac OS X supports hyper-threading, which means for less memory you can multi-task better. I would suggest getting the higher-end of the two mac minis. Two: Get a Windows machine. Any Windows machine should be able to do what you want. Dell is good because it's convenient and they're cheap. You might want to make sure you have AT LEAST 512MB of ram though, more if possible, if you're going to run Photoshop. Windows XP seems to need a lot of ram. If you have the skills, or know someone who do, make your own PC. Go trudge around in computer shops and find your own parts. Even when your demands for your PC aren't very high, making your own PC is always most cost-effective. Problem would be that by making your own PC you won't have a very comprehensive warranty system, probably just parts warranties. So basically: If you don't mind the mac system (and it really is a wonderful user experience, I assure you), get the mac mini. If you want to stick with WinXP, get a Dell, or build one yourself. Not very specific, I know, but I hope it helps.

Totally random here, but the so called pi day is actually White Day in Japan, where boys who had received chocolates from girls on Valentine's Day (one month before) would give a gift back to the girl.One day after pi day is my powerbook's birthday! She's one year old now! *pats*

Hmm. Chiiyo is my "japanese" name, the name that I came up with that I call myself by (NOT a translation of my name, which is basically riri or something like that). The kanji, or the characters that make up my name, basically mean "small" and "world". There's no big principle or idea I'm trying to expound with the characters here, but often I realise that names play an important part in moulding someone, even if it was a name that I chose for myself, and the words mean humility and shyness to me, thus often that is what happens to my personality when I post on message boards.I'm not japanese by the way, just someone rather interested in the culture...

Hmm, maybe you would want to say what kind of usage you would have for the new computer? I mean, besides photoshop. Do you use photoshop very extensively on big files? Do you play games? Do you have special software you have to use that has no real substitutes in other OSes?Because of the buggy nature of Windows, I would usually veer towards either the Mac or Linux. Your budget also matters. Do you always have viruses? Do you like Macs? (considering you actually included Macs in your list, I figured you have at least a little interest in them.)Hm. how about building your own computer? It's a lot cheaper and you can customise a lot of it, save money on what you don't really care about, and invest money on parts you really need. What level of computing expertise are you at?Sorry about all the questions but they are usually necessary before people can give you good advice for your type of question...

Slightly off-topic, but ThinkGeek has some really funky caffiene products. Mints, drinks even soap! I come from Singapore too, but never knew that our Red Bull is diluted. O_o. Maybe cos I never drink Red Bull. On a side note, I'm allergic to caffiene. =_=. I get diarrhoea when I eat too much chocolate, drink too much tea, coke or milo... But I do it anyway. Can't live without caffiene. At least not a university student. Just so that this is not totally off-topic, I find that taking a short but intense nap for around 15 to 20 minutes actually bring energy back to the body. (I always thought that was called powernapping, but apparently not...) Although this method is better used when there are people around you. I used to take really short but very focused on relaxing and sleeping naps when I'm out studying with friends, and I know they would wake me up.

By the way, if it wasn't clear enough, the reason why CSS allows you to type in 3 characters instead of 6, and therefore assume that the hex color code you're using has paired characters, is because on the whole, paired character hex color codes are also web-safe colour codes, which means that most systems and most browser should be able to render that colour properly. Since CSS is a good way of standardising layout, it's quite reasonable that they expect the people who use CSS to also use web-safe colours.

Since this is the Photoshop board let's populate it with a post on the namesake of Photoshop: how to do basic editing of photos.Note: This is for both digital photos and film photos that have been scanned and turned into digital format.The key here is streamlining workflow. So usually, even before you think of opening up the photos in Photoshop. make sure you have deleted the ones that are too blur or are not satisfactory. If there is one thing Photoshop can't fix, that's overly blur pictures. So you can either open the photos up in ACDSee and see each photo at a relatively high resolution (I usually suggest around 75% of your screen at least to check for blurry images), and then delete them or make a note not to open them up in Photoshop.Another way is to make use of Photoshop CS's File Browser, which you can access under the "Windows" menu. By default the window for previewing the photo is quite small, but if you move the meta-tags and other menus away you should be able to preview the photo quite well.Now open the photos up in Photoshop. First thing you should do is adjust the colour of the pictures (I'll cover black and white later). DON'T use Auto Levels, Auto Color and Auto Contrast. They cut out the information from the original picture. Try, instead, using Curves, which is under Edit > Adjustments. When you open up Curves you will see a graph and a diagonal line. We'll leave the line for later. Note the three eyedropper icons at the side. Click on the middle one (grey in colour), and then click on your photo a region that is SUPPOSED to be white. (This is kind of like setting your white balance) To get good skin tones you're supposed to click on the whites of people's eyes or their teeth (if their teeth are white of course). If you get a colour cast that you like, remember to make a snapshot of it. I usually make several snapshots, and play around with the eyedropper quite a few times before I settle on a particular colour cast I like.After that you can click on the black eyedropper and select the region of the picture that is supposed to be black. Shadows are usually lighter than black, so try a few areas. The white eyedropper I have hardly used, because of the strange results that occur, but you can fiddle around with it too.The diagonal line in the graph of the Curves dialog is quite intuitive. Basically drag the line to change the shape of the line, and your picture will change in terms of contrast. It's really quite complicated to explain the effects, so just play around with it, you'll understand.After adjusting using the Curves dialog, there isn't usually any other colour adjustments left. Sometimes I open up Levels (also under Edit>Adjustments) and check that the histogram (the graph in the Levels dialog) is a good one. A good histogram looks like a normal/bell curve, where the middle portion is relatively full, and less in the extreme left and extreme right. You can move the little triangles below the histogram to change the contrast, but usually the curves is a better option since you don't lose data from curves adjustment.For black and white photos it's usually an easier process. First off I'd convert the photo to Grayscale (Edit > Mode > Grayscale) so I'll have a true black and white photos, and then play around the Curves dialog as mentioned above, only it's easier because you don't have to deal with colour cast, just the overall exposure of the picture.If you've scanned your photos from a film roll, it's worth your while to then zoom in to your photo (I usually zoom in at 100%) and then check the entire photo for scratches, dust and lines. A ten-pixel healing brush usually does the touching-up pretty well. After that you can save your photo and be done with it!This is a basic-level photo editing tutorial because this is just adjusting colour and clearing dust (usually that's all I do to my photos). I know there are tutorials out there that talk about cropping, burning and dodging, and more advanced stuff like replacing backgrounds and the like, maybe I'll cover a few of these later.Any comments and suggestions? There are lots of ways to do basic colour adjustments, this is the method that I find the least-damaging to photos and easiest and most consistent. But of course, the best thing is if the photo was well-exposed and doesn't need any colour correction at all...

Hmm, just a quick question here: If you have the same page, and three different designs by using three different css stylesheets, would it really solve the problem? I'm confused because I thought the browsers don't display a page properly because of the original html coding in it, and if css only changes the appearance of the page, how is it that a page that looks bad in one browser can look better with a change of css? Does that in fact mean that css is part of the reason why the browser screwed up in the first place??I know my question is a bit loopy-going-around-in-circles... A bit blur about this.

Actually it really depends on what kind of editing capabilities you need. I'm on a Mac so of course I would say either FCP or FCE is really good (even iMovie HD is cool), but on the PC even there are many different types of programs. For Video usually they say that Adobe Premiere is the standard, which means it really does do anything and everything you want it to do, but if all you need is to piece a video together, splice parts, add subtitles, rearrange and add music, you would have a whole lot of other options open to you which do the job fine and don't require that amount of cost. For example, I dabble in a little home-video editing for events and such and I feel that Premiere is a little overkill (good to have, but overkill nevertheless) so I used Ulead Videostudio.As far as i know there isn't a trial version of any of these... ask around if any of your friends have it and try it out first before buying?

Hmm. I used to work at a Photo Developing Shop (Kodak Express) and I developed a lot of photos taken on many different digital cameras. I would say that the really high-end DSLRs are all good, you can pick and choose which one you think is the best based on features alone. But for the prosumer or consumer digital cameras, I'd like to share some of my observations.Note: This was sometime ago, say 6 months ago, so the newer cameras from these brands might have changed the system. What I'm saying is, if you want to buy a consumer or prosumer camera, test it out first and see whether this still holds true.Olympus myu series cameras tend to take pictures that have an orange or yellow tinge, which is very obvious when the picture is taken indoors with flash. On the whole people haven't complained much about Olympus cameras other than that, just that the xD media is really expensive as compared to other types of media cards.Sony cameras are also slightly on the yellow side, but usually it's the lens that lets the picture down. You might notice that sometimes the pictures are a little soft. Especially if you compare them to something taken by a Nikon camera, for example. And the memory stick is also an expensive media.Canon cameras are so-so. CompactFlash cards and SD cards mean the media is really affordable, and on the whole, there are no prevalent colour problems with Canon cameras.Nikon and Pentax are good brands, based on their colour intepretation and the sharpness of their photos. Panasonic Lumixs are also not too bad, haven't heard really bad comments about them as yet. If shopping for a prosumer or consumer camera, usually I would recommend to my customers these three brands, Nikon being my first choice. This was based wholly on day-in day-out manipulation and colour-correcting of digital photos, and because at that point I also wanted to get a small digital camera, but I'm really finicky about colour intepretation and skin tones.Of course, these colour casts usually are only apparent when you take pictures indoors. Everyone performs relatively well outdoors. (Which is why you can see my face drain when I realise all the photos are indoors....>_<)Hope this helps. As mentioned, Pro cameras are usually worth their salt and don't suffer from any of these problems. *grin* As for me, I don't own a digital camera! *haha* I went and bought me a Nikon FM2, fully manual camera, doesn't even need batteries to run, solid piece of machinery! *ignore me, I'm strangely stubborn this way*

Hmm. The Mac slice of this message board is really low. 9 pages and only two people have mentioned Safari. I adore Safari. But anyway, back to designing pages that are compatible with browsers, people please don't forget the Apple users. And the Linux users. (Although I'm not familiar with Linux browsers.... anyone else here uses Linux?) The one thing you must note is that Internet Explorer for Mac is really really gross, but there ARE people who use it. IE for Mac is really old, Microsoft stopped development of it, but there are still websites out there that require IE (my school's server for one), and people on the Mac are sometimes using IE despite better browsers out there like Safari, Mozilla and Firefox. What may look good on IE for Windows might look really bad on IE for Mac. I know, I used to use IE when I was on Windows, and the webpage that I painstakedly tested on Netscape and IE looked totally different on my new Mac's IE (although it looked only slightly different on Safari). iCapture for viewing pages in a Mac environment has already been mentioned, ieCapture is the cousin, for webdesigners on Macs. Also, Lynx Viewer is for viewing your site in text-based browsers (really cool and yet extremely disturbing sometimes). But I think, in the end, the best way to make sure the site looks good is to use good, dependable code. Quite a few of my other sites turned out normal when I checked them with IE for Mac, because I like to stick to the very basic versions of codes and stay far far away from browser-specific code.

Also note that the size of the mp3 depends on what bitrate you rip the original file. Normally, when the mp3 is of a song that is around 5 minutes, and it's only around 3 to 5 mb, then it's ripped at a low bitrate. If you listen to the mp3 and then listen to the original CD you can hear a difference. Because of so, I always rip my CDs at the highest possible bitrate, which is 320kbps (I think), and the file usually ends up being around 10 mb instead.This is only applicable if you ripped your music off cds of course.

Another notepad fan, although after I switched over to Mac I've been using Mac-alternatives for Notepad. I love those programs where you can have tabbed windows like in Firefox and Safari...Problem is, I never like to indent my code. Most of the time I just type away and everything ends up being in one big clump. Some of the WPRs have commented that my coding looks disgusting...Any opinions on that? I like my code in one big clump so I don't have to scroll too far down to get to where I want, and I can understand my own coding, so no problems there... But I do use nested tables all the time, and I worry that it might be against some kind of W3C code to not indent code?So? To indent or not indent?(Just so that I'm not totally off-topic altogether)I never really liked WYSIWYG programs, although the last time I used one was Dreamweaver 2. They had a lot of strange code that really wasn't necessary, and I worried that the coding done by WYSIWYG programs might not be compatible with all systems. I don't use pictures in my design so it's pretty imperative that my tables look roughly the same in all systems. So question, do WYSIWYG programs nowadays churn out (let's not talk about bloat) code that can be consistently displayed across all systems?