Friday, January 03, 2014

The new Blog Header, with appreciation to Gogo and Mr. Whybrow

Ever since cute blonde Gogo changed her blog header I had been thinking that I needed to do one rather than just have plain text.  I had been meaning to do it, just never got around to it.  I am, after all, quite a lazy blogger.

But I was taking some pictures today, at my new home, some cheesecake ones to tell the truth.  I decided to try to get a formal style portrait for the downstairs.  I did get some pictures I thought were fairly well done, specifically this one:



I liked it so much, because it "exemplifies Ms. CC" , so I quickly cropped it down to make a new profile picture.

However, my friend Mr. Whybrow of Caledon said it was dark and could use some lightening up.  I had taken it using a non-fixed region windlight because the lighting was good only a few minutes before....it had gotten darker, and this pic looked even darker in the profile.  He suggested I try again with prim lighting... but I don't do that, don't usually need to because I'm running around with a fixed time windlight....but not this time.

But I liked the picture so I normalized it up in the GIMP and used THAT.  Then I realized that might make a good blog header.  Played around with it until I realized it would work best with some text on it, so I added some BodoniXT in The GIMP.  That got my header.

So Kudos to Gogo and Mr. Whybrow...and my new EVGA GT640 Rev 2. (that's the recent Superclocked GDDR5 version not the 2012 version) video card, which let me actually MOVE (with a low 15fps) with ambient occlusion, full shadows and depth of field on.  And not crash a few minutes after turning them off again.  In fact I've turned them on and off 3 times.

2 comments:

Alastair Whybrow said...

Thank you, Miss Creeggan; very kind of you to say so. Miss Bluebird never goes anywhere without an invisible sphere attached to her; windlight's fine but the sun pans across in a fixed direction, like the real one, so you can't always guarantee the light's coming from the right angle. Even the darkest hair needs some highlighting, or you'll just get a silhouette. Your tweak's not only corrected that, but brought out its natural richness.

Unknown said...

Mr Whybrow, I thought that YOU were the invisible sphere? *snerk*

And yes, Miss Creeggan; that is a fine picture of a lovely lady. Real Bond Street standard.