Well we're checked in, so all we have to do is pack now. B)

From Boxer Turtle - Week #6

In work that is. After that we fly off to Hong Kong and a weeks relaxation and sight seeing. I know nothing about the place to speak of, other than it was one of those postings I volunteered for when I was in the RAF some 20 odd years ago - my turn never came round, though I must have been the most experienced Wessex Air Communications Technician going at the time. Still, it will be interesting to see what's happened to it since the Chinese took over. Rather looking forward to having something rather different to photograph, I can't imagine it will be anything like Riyadh, or Saudi in general. It looks like we may well be dragging the laptop along with us so I may well be able to keep in touch with those who are reading along - not that anyone ever says anything in the comments...

This finally arrived on Wednesday and though it's really comfortable and well made, I'm not sure my face has grown into it yet. Still I'm sure both I and everyone round me will get used to it, it'll keep the sun off my rather delicate head too.

Should you want such a hat, you could do worse than look here at the same Explorer Leather Fold-Up decorating my very English bonce.

Link: http://www.colorsontheweb.com/colorwizard.asp

At long last, I've got round to altering some of the text colour settings on here. Whilst on a decent contrasty monitor everything looked fine, once seen on something of a lesser standing, things began to blend in a little too much. All I've done is use the colour picker at the link above to select something with slightly more saturation so that the text stands out somewhat from the background. There's a definite improvement to my eyes, but I'm still not convinced that #393939 is the best colour for the bit that reads:

Written by: Chris of Arabia
Published on March 13th, 2009 @ 15:51:00 , using 94 words, No views
Posted in

No doubt I'll get back to it in a few months time... :.

EDIT: Decided I prefered #2f2f2f instead

For anyone who didn't notice, the image below is now the re-worked one, along the lines of what I was suggesting.

I need more votes on Boxer Turtle by the way, so if you're passing that way, you know what to do...

Whilst on the face of it, this looks a little like an ordinary selective colour treatment, it wasn't quite that simple. In this case I was trying to get the juice itself to gradually get stronger in colour as it left the carton, till it was full on orange in the glass.

The trick here was to layer two copies of the same image; one a full colour shot, with the second being desaturated (in this case by 75%). To the second layer, I added a foreground/background gradient mask, which had the effect of giving me a full colour image, but which gradually desaturated towards the top of the image. Next I added another layer and used the Channel Mixer to convert to B&W, using the built in blue filter. Finally, I used the eraser tool and my Bamboo tablet to gradually rub out the stream of orange and the contents of the glass, revealing the colour beneath. Nearly successful I think, but I reckon that perhaps the de-saturated layer might have worked better as a pure B&W conversion and then stop the gradient before it reached the nozzle in the carton. I need more practice with a tablet too - just be grateful you can't see the original 3456x2304 PSD file.

This was taken for Week 5 of The Photo Forum's Boxer Turtle competition