• I have taken over as the art director for Not So Modern Drummer magazine: this is where a considerable amount of my time has gone
• As of August 22nd I will be attending IU for a graduate degree in Human Computer Interaction Design
• The amount of work that I have been doing for Incriminator and TrueTech USA has increased considerably

All of these have been great developments, but they have, unfortunately taken away from the time I can spend on this site. However, there are two very important things that will effect both Rogue Scholar Media and this site! The first is that I have decided to add someone to handle .NET programming and help with design. His name is Matt Lawson, and he will also be posting to this site. I’m excited because Matt is a great guy to work with and will fill in a lot of the gaps that I have in developing for the World Wide Web. The second thing is that the site will now have a freebies section and a recent projects section. Freebies will have stock photos, designs, code, and other items that anyone can use for any purpose that they want. The recent projects section will be home for a mix of musings about projects, the creative process, and a few explanations of the process that goes into making a design/site.

So, in spite of being as busy as ever, Rogue Scholar Media, and this site, will continue to move forward.

So, with the new site, I figured it might be good to do a quick write up about how I take a design from comp to realized design. I will warn that this is a design that hasn’t been finalized. As of writing this design has been sent to the client, but it hasn’t been given the green light to go to press (fingers crossed). Ultimately, I would really like to see this one finalized (and be able to wear it), but if it doesn’t, at least I have a design I like and a chance to write about it.

A project, for me, usually starts with a phone call or email. In this case it was a little of both. I received a set of photos of the Yellow Fever pulling truck in my email inbox without much heralding or explanation. The truck was cool, but I kind of wondered if there had been some sort of mix-up for the email’s recipient.

Then my phone rings. Pulling truck needs new shirt design. Cartoon style logo with a mosquito in it. That all sounds reasonable. I’ll get right on it.

So, there are a lot of ways that this sort of thing could be approached. Along with the trucks I had been sent a picture that kind of looked like a Derek Hess imitation drawing of an anthropomorphic mosquito. Okay, I have always really liked Derek’s stuff and I  really enjoy drawing insects, so this was getting better and better. So, I broke out my sketch pad and made a couple of quick drafts.

Now I’m not sure what happened, but these ended up no where near where I wanted. The first and last ones could probably have worked with a lot of refinement. The middle one I can only blame on a brief lapse of thought and motor control. The good news is, that I had a few options to show. Then something unusual popped into my head.
I don’t know if it’s because I don’t really know that much about Truck Pulls, or just the fact that the truck had it’s engine poking through the hood, but something made me think of Ed “Big Daddy” Roth and his most famous character: Rat Fink. So I decided to try to pull off that style, with a big anthropomorphic mosquito and a little Yellow Fever truck for him to rise out of.

Okay, so the drafts are done (in record time) and the first submission to the client. This is the hardest part of the whole thing. I have three that I’m not really feeling and one that I really like. Now I learned early that you can’t enter into this situation trying to steer the client. Sure, I like only one of these, but I could be way off base. So, I have thoroughly convince myself that one of the stinkers will get the go ahead, with the addition that I really tighten up the design before I even think of putting it into the computer. Maybe I’ll even get a “go back to the drawing board,” but there is no way that I’ll get the go-ahead for the “Big Daddy drawing.”

Phone rings, “We looked at the drawings you sent, we really like the one with the truck.”

Really?!? Wow, okay I’ll get right on that!

So I’m going forward with the drawing I liked. What a great start! Since I scanned the drawings to email them, all I needed to do is import the drawing into Illustrator. With that, I start drawing over the original with the pen tool. While this may seem like an extra step, there are a few advantages to using the pen tool to create a second rough outline: 1. it lets me get a cleaner view of how the image will be blocked off, 2. it lets me see where I will want to logically break up the image into layers, and 3. it lays down a framework that for the more structural lines of the drawing without any distracting details.

Now, the pen tool is great for creating intricate and specific lines, but it lacks a certain amount of humanity. When I draw, pressure and hardness of pencil combine to create lines of varying width to add a certain element of me to the drawing. To get this element back, I turn to the blob brush tool. The blob brush tool doesn’t have very much in common with the regular brush tool, aside from the fact that they are both free-form drawing tools. The blob brush creates fills of varying size based on pressure from a pen tablet. Also, the fills that the tool creates merge together if they are the same color, removing the need to merge after the drawing is done. The second part is notable because it means that I need to divide the drawing into logical sections that can be placed on separate layers so that they don’t join into one big blob. This is where the planning in the pen tool stage can really pay off.

So, here I have gone over the pen tool tracing for the mosquito. Notice that I have used the original pen lines in some places, traced over them in others, and completely ignored them in others. This allows the deign to have a certain aspect of spontaneity and evolve through the creation process. Now at this point I will admit that I considered the mosquito to be the easy part, and so I fleshed it out more completely before moving on to maintain my motivation through the process of drawing the truck.

So, now that I have the mosquito finished, I begin to work on the truck. The first thing that I notice as I’m working on the truck is that the perspective seems a little skewed. One of the most important things that I’ve found for drawing automobiles (or trucks be it the case) is to maintain accurate perspective. Otherwise the vehicle looks dis-proportionate, which really ruins it. Since I had originally sketched in some perspective lines, I just transferred those over to the Illustrator drawing to help guide the lines. With the perspective lines in place, drawing the truck actually becomes fairly easy.

So, finally, it is just a matter of adding details and tightening up the whole image. Since the image is drawn entirely in blobs, making adjustments isn’t exactly as easy as changing the handles on a point in a line. Thankfully, the warp tool can be used to move lines around a little bit. A little definitely goes a long way, however, so I’m careful to not make it look too manipulated. Since the final destination is for printing on a two color shirt, I have a total of three colors to work with. In this case the colors are grey, yellow, and black. Ultimately, I decided the outline needs to be black (the outline also includes a lot of shading, so the darkest color was an easy choice). For the main color, I chose yellow, since it is yellow fever, not grey fever. The grey then becomes an accent color. Originally the idea was to use it for the lighter colors in the image, but ultimately I just started using it to add a little color difference and separate the parts of the truck. Okay, that’s it for this first installment. This will be finished in another article, where I will go over making the rest of the shirt.

So, here is how it works:

Fig. 1 - The Z Coord is zero at the screen, increases as it heads into the background

Each instance of the class is a Movie Clip panel that has the usual X and Y coordinates, but also gives a Z coordinate that controls the depth of the panel fig1.

By creating different panels at different depths you get layers in 3 dimensions fig2.

Fig. 2 The Panels create a sense of depth

Then run the setup method for each panel to get them started. After having created the panels, add child movie clips of whatever you want (movies or graphics), at sufficient size, to create layered images.
Now where the class actually starts to do its thing is when you call the setXCoord and setYCoord methods to move the panels around. These methods take the argument of an X or Y coordinate and move the panels, in perspective based off of the Z coord of the panel, that distance from the center, in the opposite direction (it moves in the opposite direction because that makes it ready to take a mouseX or mouseY argument and move towards the mouse as opposed to away).

And that’s about it. It is a simple effect, but it’s really in its usage that you get some nice effects. Like I said, this is a rough of the final class. It doesn’t handle zoom effects yet, requires a setup step and a little more user input then it may ultimately need to have. But its a work in progress. . .and its free! You can use it for any purpose, commercial or otherwise, I just ask that you drop me a line and show me how it is used. I really like the effect that this creates and like to see it in use. . .something I just haven’t had the time for myself.
Cheers!
-Shad

Dead Theatre

Completed in 2003, this was my thesis at the College of Wooster. Stop motion animation, no computer effects aside from capturing and compiling.

Concordia Discors

This is a music video for the band Concordia Discors, made using a broken Nintendo and Punch-Out. I do not remember the song’s name, so if anyone does, please let me know.

Currently you can find them in use at:

• Ars Technica in an article about jailbreaking iPods
• ePhotozine in an artistic interpretation from Mick5 including what I believe is a Lovecraft quote (and a reminder of why I wish I had a working darkroom at the moment
• In an anti-drug trafficking poster for Guyana in South America designed by by Seana Shanks
• Apparently this Polish banking site has used one of my pictures. . .somewhere. I do not speak Polish, so I’m at the whims of Google Translation, which hasn’t helped me find my pic, but they assure me it’s there (also I’m very impressed with their English in emails)

Nothing like contributing to make it all seem worthwhile!

Update Dec. 28 2009: Slowly but surely putting together the video from this event, will post when finalized.

But before I get to that, what is HDR photography?

A normally exposed photo with less than awesome lighting. Thanks to Famous Drums and Matt Middleton for the subject

HDR photography is a process. It is not a filter, a program, or an attribute of a specific camera body (although all of these things can be relevant to the process). It is an answer to a question that has been around about as long as photography: how do I get the most detail in all ranges of tone? An example of this problem is taking an interior shot that includes a window into a sunny exterior. You can properly expose the exterior parts while underexposing the interior. Or you can properly expose the interior while overexposing the exterior. Or you can shoot for the middle and end up with some blow outs in the white and solid blacks in the darks. All of these can work, depending on the situation. But wouldn’t it be nice if there was a way to get all of the detail across the entire range?

In analog photography, there were developments in the film itself that allowed for higher and higher tonal range. Since you could burn and dodge areas, you could get a lot of detail throughout the range. But there is no film in a digital camera. Another technique that does apply to digital cameras is taking  a series of bracketed photos that ensure proper exposure across the whole range. Then you could print the darkest areas from the lightest exposure, the lightest areas from the darkest eeposure, and the mid tones from all of the pictures in between. Now this was less than ideal for film photography because burning and dodging are hard enough, but creating an even merger between three different photos. . .that is time consuming and difficult. But digitally, you can let the computer do it while you go get a sandwich. . . sort of.

Digital cameras tend to bunch up when it comes to extreme lights and darks. The result is color noise in extremely dark areas and a complete lack of any information in the extreme light areas. If you’ve ever under or over-exposed an image and tried to digitally correct it this becomes even more apparent. Without going into too much detail, this has to do with how pixels are used to record and display color and tone. So, by making the light areas less light, and the dark areas less dark you get more detail or depth in the overall image. All very cool stuff, but you can’t just throw the images together and expect good results. It takes time to merge the photos (some cameras can do this, or you can use Photoshop CS3+, or a specific tool such as Photomatix) and then it takes work to get all of the exposures to work together to make an overall pleasing image. Still easier than crop, burn, dodge, repeat. . .but more time consuming than taking good old fashioned LDR (Low Dynamic Range) photos and working with them a little in post.

Results of Merge to HDR Automation in Photoshop. Gets your lights darker and your darks lighter!

But wait, there’s more!

Having an HDR image is kind of like having too much information. . .there’s going to be some that gets wasted. Most printers and monitors can only display images as LDR. So it may initially look worse as opposed to better. That’s where tone mapping come in. Tone mapping takes different forms for different applications but it comes down to taking your HDR image and specifically filtering it down to work with LDR devices. This can allow you to retain the detail you want and actually show it!

HDR through Photomatix, with Tone Mapping. Super detail, but a little surreal. Also watermarked, because I have not paid for it yet

On top of allowing for a large amount of detail across a wide tonal range, the extra range also allows for a myriad of special effects. More hue data means you can really boost the colors, you can smooth and enhance tiny parts of the picture based on their surroundings to achieve surreal illustational effects or you can get a look that is almost hyper real just by manipulating the light and dark points and applying an unsharp filter. It is all great fun, and the results cover a wide range of styles (Flickr’s HDR Pool has great examples of the wide range of HDR photography). So why am I on the fence?

Here are my major misgivings about HDR photography:

1. It can be very time consuming compared to taking better individual picture.
   Admittedly, there is a cap on the quality of single pictures and some scenes just cannot be captured that way, but consider what you are taking a picture of and weigh the options
2. I don’t know if there is an inherent value to the more illustrative techniques, or if it is a trend that will fade
   The effects are really cool (and can even be applied to single photos with the help of some programs). But is that all that they are?
3. HDR can be very expensive
   Okay, so I know I said that it can be done with any camera and most image processing software. To do it well, however, you pretty much need a good tripod ($100 – $200) and a digital SLR (You can get an old Nikon D50 for around $200 used, which is a fine body). To do it efficiently, you need specialized software (most of the specific HDR applications are around $100 and up) and either a good computer or a lot of patience. Now I know that is not a complaint for most photographers (it isn’t a cheap hobby or profession) and that if you already have most of these things then its no issue.

So, I’m on the fence. I don’t know how much interest to invest in HDR. If you want to learn more about it, Stuck in Customs has a great tutorial and also some promotion codes to get a discount on the software they recommend. For all the arguments, I wouldn’t be surprised if my stock.xchange gallery started looking a little more dynamic.

Here are the images next to each other, for comparison:

Normal Exposure

Photoshop HDR

Photomatix with Tone Mapping - note that this was done quickly, and could look more real or surreal depending on settings

1. Does it look funny? Possibly like another program, but not quite?
2. Does it try to trap you into saying yes? Do they ask the same question more than once changing the yes and no buttons to trip you up?
3. Does it look like a system component, but does the language sound more like marketing than geek?
4. When you close it, does it come back without request?
5. Did you not ask/search/request for something like this
6. Does it effect your operations beyond running. For example, does it prevent you from running a program or opening a new browser window?

If you answered “yes” to any single one of these, there is a good chance you are dealing with malware or a scam. Worthwhile to lookup the name in Google and see if there is anymore info about the program. Most importantly, DO NOT GIVE YOUR MONEY TO PEOPLE WHO USE THIS TYPE OF MARKETING! Why? Because the reason these programs which can totally hose your system exist is because someone is giving them money. It breaks down to extortion, and there is a way to beat it!
So how did I deal with this issue? It was a particularly aggressive little guy: blocks applications from running, takes up a decent amount of resources, prevents you from opening task manager or add/remove programs.

So, here’s what I did:

1. Restart computer
2. As soon as Windows started, before applications on the taskbar started I opened task manager by pressing CTR+ALT+DELETE
3. Windows Police Pro started, but could not kill task manager allowing me to shut it down temporarily
4. Before Windows Police Pro could start I opened Firefox (IE might or might not have worked, did not bother trying)
5. Downloaded Malwarebytes from here: http://www.malwarebytes.org/ while closing Windows Police Pro every time t tried to start back up
6. Installed and ran a scan with Malwarebytes (no restart, but had to be done when Windows Police Pro was not running)
7. Went and got lunch. . .the scan takes some time and was slowed further by Windows Police Pro
8. After scan, clicked “Show Results” and removed all the infected files
9. Had to restart.
10. Upon restart, the visual part of the malware had been removed, but there were still some registry issues. I assume this happened because Windows Police Pro kept restarting during the process. The effect was that applications could not be opened by a double-click, but they could be started by RunAs
11. Ran MalwareBytes again, following previous method and restarted
12. Computer was back to running as usual

I don’t know if this will help anyone, but it seemed like a lot of the solutions I found required a small second application to enable task manager. I found that getting it running before Windows Police Pro got started seemed to grandfather it in. Maybe I had a weak version of the virus, or perhaps a configuration unique to my system allowed me to do this, but I thought I would share my experience. Oh, and I was really happy to get to play IT guy, even if for just a littler bit! Also, the viruses that Windows Police Pro were detecting on my system were all made up. The only virus on the system was Windows Police Pro.