my weekend, and the Turkish grand prix

Posted by: Sean | Posted on: May 30th, 2010 | 0 Comments

This weekend has been an extremely lazy weekend for me in relation to getting any work done online, most of this weekend I spent actually working in my job, and between working and sleeping I didn't have an awful lot of free time to myself. The only free time that I had was last night (Saturday) after work, which I ended up not spending at home, and watched the film Avatar, which is actually a great, film. I never saw it before and I really enjoyed it, bits of the film looked like a computer game though, but for the most part it was a great film. I think I will definitely be going out to buy the blu-ray disc of it :D.

Then onto today, since I didn't get to watch today's grand prix race live I had to set it to record, and I have just finished watching it before I started to write this blog post. Today's race was interesting and the unexpected happened, Vettel and Webber had a huge collision, just when they were in first and second position, on lap 41, CRASH!, into the side of each other, Vettel was forced to retire as his car was unfit to continue where Webber had to make a pit stop to repair the damages caused to his car. That made it great for McLaren who now had Lewis Hamilton and Jenson Button in first and second position :D. It was a great race and definitely a well deserved victory for McLaren! Now the championship leader board is really close with Lewis in third, Jenson in second with Webber in first! Bring on the Canadian grand prix in two weeks time!

a good web series

Posted by: Sean | Posted on: May 29th, 2010 | 0 Comments

Now that all my favourite television shows are either going on a break for the summer of have completely finished, I am now looking for new shows to waste my time watching for this summer. A show I recently came across is actually a web TV-show, each episode varies in length, some lasting 12 - 15 minutes others are 9 minutes. The show is called "The Professionals", and it is basically about an IT support hotline that is also a assassin for hire, you know the average it support show! :D The show is really funny, and I wasted loads of my time last night watching it, it is just so funny. You should definitely go and have a look at it, the show comes out once a month, however sometimes they miss their deadlines!

You can watch the show here, and there is a trailer for their show below!

Brushing up on photoshop

Posted by: Sean | Posted on: May 28th, 2010 | 0 Comments

I finally got around to getting the new Photoshop set up on my computer and last night i began to look around and try some of the new tools out.

The first thing i had to try out was the new content-aware tool, this tool makes touching up photos and taking any marks or details out of photographs extremely simple. I remember trying to take something out of a picture before, and attempt to cover it up, but it just didn't looks right. And even if you do manage to take something out of a photo and it looks flawless, then most likely it took a few hours to do. With content-aware though, it only takes a few seconds, sometimes when the content-aware has finished taking out what you chose to, it leaves behind a few smudges, these are very minor, and can be easily touched back up. Below is a quick photo i edited tonight with content-aware, on the left is the original picture and on the right is the picture after the adjustments. (Click the picture to see a larger version!)

So in case you cant tell what i did, i took out the tree in the centre of the picture and also removed the clouds, looks alright doesn't it! And just to show what ridiculous things you can do with it, i made another picture using content aware, this time it made things in the picture that were never there before! (Click the picture to see a larger version!)

As you can see i made more trees appear! The reason that content-aware can do this is because it see what is beside what you want to remove and tries to blend it in to match it, naturally there is trees beside the sky i want to remove so it fills the sky in with trees!

To use content-aware you just select what you want to remove and press delete, the option that pops up allows you to use content-aware if you want to. The other things i was doing with Photoshop was looking at different filters than can be applied to photographs, i want to learn more about photo editing, and since my photo a day challenge is beginning in a few days i am thinking of mixing a real life photo with some Photoshop touch-up work! More on this before i begin the challenge though!