BaLtiMoRe RoLL

DreSSed In BluE FriNge

Of course she knew I couldn't resist the call to fix up this photo. It's an awesome moment that she managed to capture (seriously, she has such a great eye for composition and a great sense of timing), but unfortunately she ended up with so much blue fringing that of course it was the first thing I noticed. And although I have previously sent her my instructions for removing blue fringe, I'm sure she knew that I wouldn't be able to resist doing it myself if she left the original up on Flickr! And so I went to town.

I thought I'd post the process here in case you have blue fringe problems too, and of course, a copy of either Photoshop or Photoshop Elements (I think these methods should work in either).

So here's the original photo:

First, I removed the blue fringe using the following method. I actually did it twice since there were essentially two different hues of blue that needed removal.

(To give credit where credit is due, I learned this technique from this guy.)

1. Zoom in until you can see the blue or purple pixels that you'll want to remove (I usually zoom to at least 300%).
2. Click on the background layer if it's not already selected (e.g., if you just added a curves layer, then it's the curves layer that is still selected, not the background layer.)
3. Duplicate the background layer (Ctr/Command-J).
4. Go to Filter > Blur > Gaussian Blur and use a value of 180.
5. Click the eye icon next to the duplicate layer in the layers palette to hide it for now.
6. Select the eyedropper in the toolbar and set it to sample a 3x3 pixel area.
7. Go to Select > Color Range. Move the cursor over the image window (it turns into an eyedropper) and sample the color in the blue fringe. Adjust the fuzziness slider to 90 in the Color Range dialog.
8. Go to Select > Modify > Expand selection and enter 3 pixels.
9. Go to Select > Feather > and enter 2 pixels.
10. Click the eye icon next to the duplicate layer to make the layer visible and click the layer in the layers palette to make it active.
11. Right-click, choose Blending Options, and then change the Blending Mode to Color (this preserves the underlying detail or luminance values and changes only the color).
12. Click the Add Layer Mask at the bottom of the layers palette (since you have a selection in place, the mask will hide everything except the selection). This is the icon that looks like a grey rectangle with a white circle in the middle.
13. There may still be some blue fringing. If you want to work on it further, make sure the layer mask is selected (click on it in the layers palette so that the black & white rectangle has a border around it), select the brush tool (press B), press D to set the foreground color to white, set the brush opacity to 100% in the options bar at the top, and paint over the blue fringing to clean up any stray color. Make sure you're using the Normal brush at 100%, and not a Dodge brush or something else.

Now it's much better, don't you think?

But I thought it looked a little washed out, so I worked on bringing out some of the green in the trees. I duplicated the background layer and changed the blending mode of this new layer to Color Burn at 38% Opacity, which increased the color contrast. Then I added a Hue/Saturation layer in which I increased the saturation by 20.

And here's the final result.

BluE SkiEs

I've been sitting here at my desk for the past hour, noticing the sky and thinking there was something unusually beautiful about it. Maybe it was the way the clouds looked almost sunny and the blue was a really pleasant hue. But then it hit me. It's the fact that the sky is blue today. I hadn't realized until just now that with all this rain lately, it's been a really long time since I've seen blue sky.

Huh, it's kinda pretty.

WinDfaLL

No, not Google Ads. Those are a complete bust. I would probably have to put them somewhere visible on my page in order to get people to click on them, and it's not worth it to me. (Repeat, they are not on this blog, so don't dig around looking for them... you won't find them!) I thought maybe I could make a tiny amount just from page loads, but apparently they're not putting those kinds of ads on my site and therefore I'm not making money that way.

So the windfall is not from Google Ads.

And of course, it's not really a windfall at all. Just a little more transcribing work that should bring in an extra $200 in two days. I love that this job is so flexible that I can go weeks without any work (nice when I have a dissertation to spend my time on), but then I can work about six hours and make a couple hundred. While sitting at home in my pj's. (And yes, I am still wearing my pj's at 4:20 pm. Maybe I should get dressed.)

Also, the paid blogging job I referred to a while ago is about to come through... more on that later when it actually happens.

Seriously, none of this qualifies as a windfall if you have a real job with a real salary. But if you don't have an income, such money here and there is quite welcome. :)

PhiLaDelPhiA

Yesterday I discovered, and fell in love with, Philadelphia. I know I've been there before, but never quite had a sense of where I was. I must have been somewhere in Center City when I shopped what felt like a three block radius. Cute, but certainly not enough to go on to get a feel for the city.

But yesterday J and I went to meet up with a couple of his Florida friends who were visiting the northeast in hopes of seeing snow (instead, they got grey, cold, and rainy). They really wanted to see the Body Worlds exhibit at The Franklin Institute in Philly, so J and I went to meet them. It's a really crazy and fascinating exhibit. Lots of... well, dead people. Picked to pieces, flayed apart, and sliced through. It sounds gross, but it's so fascinating that the more you see, you find that you stop really thinking about it. I did think it was a little short on information though, or at least, it wasn't placed well enough that I ever found it. For example, I don't remember finding anything about the process of plastination, and after seeing the insides of dozens of bodies I was a little bit curious to know how they'd done it! But maybe it was there on one of the walls or something, and I was simply too engrossed in the body parts to notice.

Back to Philadelphia... after the museum, we went outside to wander around. But it was, like I said, grey, cold, and rainy, so we didn't get very far before deciding to go for dinner. We met up with a friend from school who was still in town visiting his family for the holidays, first for a drink at Macy's Crossing. I don't think I'd make this a regular hangout, but I definitely enjoyed the cozy pub feel inside while it was cold and misty outside. Afterwards we went for - of course - sushi. We went to Genji where I got to eat my heart's (and stomach's) fill of sushi long after everyone else said they were full. That's what skipping lunch will do I guess. That, and a true obsession for sushi. And, even better, it was quite good - it was fresh and tasty and reasonably priced (except for the $9 single slices of toro that we couldn't bring ourselves to buy!). I definitely foresee future trips there in the future.

Afterwards, our Philly friend drove us around a little, so I got to see a little more of Center City and some of University City. I love cities in the rain for some reason, and Philly is especially great for this. There's enough life in the city to make it feel cozy even when people are hidden away inside, rather than abandoned as Baltimore often appears when it's dreary out. And actually, there were people everywhere, on their way to restaurants, meeting up at local bars, or going home from work - a totally different scene than my experience of Baltimore. (Maybe it's just the neighborhood I live in here?)

We ended the night at the White Dog Cafe, where I had a tummy warming brandied apple toddy. It completely blew away the hot apple ciders I've been having in the evenings at home (of course, I don't put brandy in those), though it also made me so sleepy that I passed out in the car on the way home, leaving J to navigate the dark highway by himself, with no one to talk to but his Pimsleur's Spanish lesson on CD.

Back to Baltimore.

TesTinG Out GooGle Ads

After hearing about this guy who sold ad space by the pixel and is nearing a million in revenue, I wondered to myself why I didn't have ads on any of my web pages. I have to say that the logic of posting an ad to a non-content site escapes me, but J has tried to explain to me that all that matters is that people go to the site. I still don't get it though - I mean, so what if I click on that site? Am I really going to notice an ad for Absinthe and be compelled to click through and buy? Or is just noticing that ad for absinthe going to make me more likely to buy it in the future... from the people who placed the ad? I mean, I get why the guy created the page. What I don't get is why anyone would want to advertise on it. I guess the advertisers must be getting something from it though, and my little non-marketing brain just doesn't understand this kind of stuff.

Anyway, I wouldn't advertise on this blog mainly because I don't get enough visitors to make it worth it. But I thought that maybe it would be interesting to try on my photoblog, especially because people who are interested in photography are often interested in buying more gear, upgrading, etc. Also, people tend to browse through the archives, so I was thinking I might get a decent number of page views, even if no one ever actually clicked on an ad. But I looked around and couldn't find anything that would really allow me to provide targeted advertising. I don't get enough visitors to have advertisers contacting me asking to place ads on my site, so my only option (I think) is Google Ads. And after chatting with a couple people about them, it really sounds like a bum deal. From what I understand, they place ads on your site according to an algorithm that calculates what would make you the most money - however much the advertiser is willing to pay just to have the ad appear on your page versus however much the advertiser is willing to pay if someone clicks on the ad. Well, of course the latter is always going to be higher, but if no one clicks on the ad then what you actually make is nothing. I thought you might be able to pick which kind of ad you want (click through versus page impressions), but no, they pick it for you under the guise of it being whatever's in your best interest.

So I decided I wasn't going to put any ads up, and then... a couple days later, I figured I'd try it out. I put them up a few minutes ago, and right away I was advertising for White Light toothpaste, acne light treatment, and Baltimore Ravens tickets, rather than camera equipment. So it doesn't look like it's going to work, but I'll leave them up for now and see if the algorithm learns anything about my site after a couple of days.

If you hate them on my site, don't worry, they'll probably go away soon! If you love them, feel free to click through and learn all you can about WhiteLight Teeth Whitener and Fall Foliage in the Pocono Mountains...