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If you want people to focus on the subject of a picture, a photographer would mention something related to the depth of field (DOP), which usually means that the subject needs to be sharp while everything else is blurred.  This can usually be accomplished by setting a large aperture e.g. f/2.8.  Sometimes I find my pictures lack this relationship, either because there is a limitation to my camera or I simply just forgot to adjust the aperture.

Fortunately, this effect can be easily accomplished using the lens blur filter in Adobe Photoshop.  I will walk through this using Adobe Photoshop CS3 and a picture of a giraffe which I took during my visit to Metro Zoo.

1. Open the image you want to edit in Photoshop and duplicate the background layer. From the “Window” menu, select “Layers” or press F7.  Right click on “Background” and select “Duplicate Layer…”.  Finally, set the original background layer to invisible by removing the eye.
   

   Duplicate background layer.

2. Click on the “Channels” tab, and click on the “Create new channel” icon at the bottom of the window.  The entire image will become black and a new channel named “Alpha 1″ will be created.  Set the RGB channel to be visible so the image reappears again.
   

   Create new channel.

3. Use whatever tool you please to fill in the shape of the giraffe.  For example I selected to use “Brush Tool” with white foreground color.
   

   In Alpha channel fill in shape of giraffe.

4. Go back to the “Layers” tab, and from the “Filter” menu select “Blur” > “Lens Blur …” to bring up the “Lens Blur” configuration window.  In the “Depth Map” section select “Alpha 1″ from the “Source:” drop down, and check off “Invert”.  In the “Iris” section adjust the “Radius” value to control the strength of the blur.  Click the “OK” button when done.
   

   Set lens blur filter settings.

5. Go back to the “Channels” tab and hide the “Alpha 1″ channel and you have successfully applied the lens blur filter.
   

   Hide Alpha 1 channel.

Before and After Lens Blur Filter

A few days ago I noticed the MiiEditor website was no longer available.  Luckily I was able to find the MiiEditor standalone application which can be run on my desktop. To run the application it requires Adobe AIR to be installed.

Here are the Mii characters I created of some of my family and friends:

A favicon is a little custom icon that appears next to a website’s URL in the address bar of a web browser. The easily way to create a favicon is to take an image with the same dimension and reduce the size to 16 pixel by 16 pixel, then save it as an Windows Icon Format. Of course if your image is too big or too complex then the results might not be appealing. I recommend that you use a 64 pixel by 64 pixel image for best results.

GIMP is a free software which allows you to do this. If you like to use Photoshop you can download a plugin from Telegraphics.

If you don’t want to go through the hassle of using graphics software to create your favicon there are website available which can do the work for you. One that I find works well is Dynamic Drive FavIcon Generator.

The easily way to install the favicon is to name the file favicon.ico and upload it to the root directory of your website. Another option is to embed your favicon with HTML code similar to the following:

<link rel="shortcut icon" href="http://www.yourwebsite.com/image/favicon.ico" type="image/x-icon"/>

For the past couple of weeks I had been having trouble trying to find the right painting to hang on my wall. I decided to try transforming my pictures taken during vacation to look like paintings. The software that I chose to use was Photoshop. Not being a graphic expert and only knowing how to use the basic functions, I was relatively surprised how easy it was transform our pictures to look at like paintings. All, I did was apply the predefined filters that already exist and walla! I’m done!

I’ve posted my transformations at my gallery.

Recently, I have been busy uploading photos to my gallery. Since the photos taken from my camera are much larger than necessary to be view on the web, all lot of image processing is needed to resize the images to a smaller resolution. I use Picasa mostly to manage my photo albums on my computer, and it comes with mass image resizing features. However, I also found two free software that allows me to do mass image resizing as well:

• Photo Gadget freeware from XemiComputers Ltd. shell extension that adds image editing options to Windows Explorer.
• FastStone Photo Resizer an image converter / resizer intended to enable users especially digital camera owners to convert, rename, resize, crop, rotate, change color depth, add text and watermark to images in a quick and easy batch mode