Miscellaneous | Shelby White - The blog of artist, visual designer and entrepreneur Shelby White.

Archive for the ‘Miscellaneous’ Category

Adobe CS4 Suite Now Shipping

October 20th, 2008

Photoshop CS4’s new Adjustments panel (Screenshot courtesy Adobe)

Today Adobe has announced the availability of Photoshop CS 4 and the entire Creative Suite 4. It features a tabbed interface, enhanced color correction and non-destructive editing tools. After using Photoshop CS4, I noticed quite a bit of areas where they speed things up. The interface is also much smoother and fluid than CS3.

Here are a list of things to look for in Photoshop CS4:
-Smoother panning and zooming and fluid canvas rotation
-Adjustments panel
-Auto-blending of images
-Improved Adobe Photoshop Lightroom workflow
-Masks panel
-Better raw image processing (for us Photogs)
-Extended depth of field
-Content-Aware Scaling (this is very cool)
-Ability to work with 3D objects with one Click

Check out all of these features and more.

Also available today are the following: Photoshop® CS4, Photoshop CS4 Extended, InDesign® CS4, Illustrator® CS4, Flash CS4 Professional, Dreamweaver®CS4, Fireworks® CS4, Contribute® CS4, After Effects® CS4, Adobe Premiere® Pro CS4, Encore® CS4, Soundbooth® CS4 and Adobe OnLocation™ CS4. Pricing for the new programs is available at Adobe’s online store.

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Xrite Color & Hue Test

October 10th, 2008

Prior to taking this test I was unsure if I could distinguish between some of the color chips. Now that I know I’m able to see the hues correctly, I’m curious who else can.

Take the Test

Post your results in the comments.

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Search & Ride

August 10th, 2008

You tend to not realize how large a city is until you can’t find what you’re looking for. These past two weekends a friend and myself have been looking for some bmx trails/jumps that I was told were on Queen Anne. Well needless to say, we didn’t find the trails, but we did stumbled upon quite a few great locations to shoot photos and some interesting vantage points looking over Seattle as well as a more northern look towards the University of Washington.

This shot has nothing to do with the search except for the fact that you can see just how large Queen Anne is. Check out the Map print out below.

The darkened area is the area that we covered twice. The area where the lines are drawn is the area that we only passed through. If anyone knows the whereabouts of these so-called trails, please leave a comment or send me an email.

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An MPeck Original

June 23rd, 2008

I just got my beautiful 3 x 8 frame from Mike. The frame is way awesome and am glad I finally got one of these. If you want one of these frames, contact him right away through his website! Now all I have to do is order twenty-four 5×7’s. Mpix here I come.

*3 x 8 = Three 4×6’s across and Eight 4×6’s down.
**5×7’s will also fit but are more bubbled out.

There will be a follow up post with the frame decorated with pictures.

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ColorSync Calibration

April 5th, 2008

ColorSync is a great thing to have built into an OS. The first time that I ever tried to calibrate my monitors using this App, I failed miserably and had to borrow an Eye-One system from Dave. I definitely succeeded this time around and have a few charts to show the difference.

Take note that there is a large difference in brightness/contrast of objects on white backgrounds. The monitor had a tendency to over comphensate the brightness and would result in blow outs. I noticed this largely when opening Safari or Firefox.

Part of the reason that these monitors were largely off calibre was because of my recent reformat of the Mac Pro Quad workstation. Things had been running a little slow and the main drive was getting congested. There is bound to be a full network format here in the next week as well as the addition of a Time Capsule. It never hurts to make sure all machines are up-to-date and running full speed.

If you’re interested in using this method of Calibration, just remember these few things:

1. Make sure you sit back at least 2.5-3 feet from your monitor (depending on how large it is).
2. Set your Brightness control to 100%.
3. It won’t be a perfect calibration. I’d still recommend getting a Calibration device such as EyeOne.

EyeOne can be purchased online at X-Rite.

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Pike Place Pillow Fight

April 1st, 2008

Today was the day of the huge Pillow Fight. All went well down there, minus the Seattle police patrolling the area. That certainly made heads turn and attracted people down into the area.

The whole purpose of this improv project was to get people to laugh and possibly spark interest to do more projects/events. I don’t have much else to say about this except that the police and the market maintenance workers were not pleased. If you’ve ever been in a pillow fight, you know that the feathers stick to everything–there were feathers everywhere in the street and on people.

Here is the link to the Seattle P.I.s photographers shots–some great ones as well.

We actually got some coverage in The Stranger-a Seattle Newspaper-for an HD video that friend Arzhang took at the Pillow Fight. I had a few repetitive words and a mini interview with a police officer–very funny.

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Ikea Madness

March 26th, 2008

These past couple weeks have been fairly busy–from moving into a new building to trying to navigate Ikea’s crazy store. I spent a solid two hours in the store just looking at different things. I ended up getting quite a few things from the store in Renton, WA. For anyone who hasn’t assembled Ikea furniture, its a blast and very fun to do. Everything is pre-drilled and fits perfectly. The only problem I had was that I didn’t start out by reading the directions. It made things difficult so I’d suggest reading them first or at least as you go along.

After putting together two tables, I decided to make a time lapse video of a dresser being built. I used iMovie so of course the quality is low and only a few cuts were made but here it is.

Music by Ferry Corsten – Into the Dark.

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NMKY (Finnish YMCA cover)

August 22nd, 2007

Sometimes when we’re bored, we have to entertain ourselves. What better way to do that than to hop on the tube and watch old Finnish I think this did the trick. Give it just one watch. You’ll be back for more.

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Weekly Re-Cap and Photo blogging.

June 13th, 2007

The annual Carson Ianson Memorial Snowboard Jam went down last Friday and Saturday. We had plenty of video and photo coverage throughout the day. Mark Oliver and myself were shooting photos as well as doing some filming (I will post a few photos below this). My brother Eyler lent me his Super 8 Film camera. I’ve always wanted to film with it so this was my chance.

I purchased two rolls of film from B&H Photo and Video to start off. Each roll is two and a half minutes and 50 feet in length. I also had a Sony VX2000 3CCD video camera to shoot with as well. The bad news was that I’d been shooting all day long with this camera to find out later, that none of the footage had even recorded. Apparently this happens when the video heads are dirty and need to be serviced. I’m still bummed about the situation but I do still have the Super 8 footage to get processed. All in all the trip was great and I know the other videographers did get footage.

On another note, I just took a look at some of the entries for this weeks photo contest and there are two photos that pop out. Both are worth viewing so check them out at Our Weekly Photo Contest.

Here are some photos from a hike I took with some friends and my brother when they were over visiting. The water fall was 380ft tall (I didn’t have the wide angle to get the whole drop in the picture). I also attached a photo of a bird that wouldn’t fly. The cat had gotten a hold of it and had to make the it release the bird.