Thursday, December 24, 2009

Unsharp Mask !!

The command in photoshop to sharpen an image is called "unsharp mask" - interesting name for a command - I had to google and find what it meant...pretty interesting history behind it too...

In the "old" days, to sharpen a film image, during developing, they used to first faintly expose another negative with the same image, but a bit blurred (the end result of which is a faint positive
!!). This blurred negative carrying the faint positive was called the unsharp mask. Then a combination of the unsharp mask and the original negative was used to develop the final print. This appeared sharper to the eye than the original print.

Today's software uses the same logic behind the scenes, creating the mask and applying it over the image....and hence the name !!

Wednesday, December 23, 2009

Top Story of the Decade

Interesting top story of the decade - not sure which show it was on radio - my best guess is "the giant show" on project 961 radio atlanta...

They were counting down the top 10 stories of the decade (2000-9), and 9-11 came in No.2

what was #1 ? It was america's obsession with celebrities - and with good reason...

People are more interested in knowing what britney did to her hair, or how anna nicole or MJ died, or the girls that tiger had....than knowing what evidence did america have to go to iraq or what caused the subprime crisis....or even where bin laden is....

This interest drives the news channels to have almost 24/7 coverage of the latest celebrity buzz....and that is just perfect for the government and corporations...as long as celebrities keep dying or screwing up...they can do whatever they want....

so this obsession deserves to be the top..not 9-11...not anything else....

Holdability

This has nothing to do with the "drinkability" of beer - which to me means how close has the brewing process got the end result (beer?) to taste like the water they started out with.

This is about the "holdability" of a magazine. Can I fold it and hold it and read it the way I want? If yes, I do end up reading more of it for sure. All those thick glossy ad pages, half page thick inserts ads, all reduce my holdability. So what do I do when I come across a mag with these? Tear all those pages out and make it more holdable.

Don't know how many others do the same, but if you are an advertiser planning on a thick glossy page, you have a better "chance" of getting these eyeballs if that ad is on a normal page....

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Thursday, December 3, 2009

French menu

If the americans were to follow the example of the french, and start listing food as it is on the menu, maybe people will eat less of their favorite meal. It will probably be listed on the menu as

Enormous greasy grilled beef patty with lettuce, tomato, pickle, smothered in mayonnaise, served in a refined flour bun, deep fried sliced potatoes dunked in salt, and a gargantuan glass of artificially flavored sugary carbonated water.


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