Your friend does not have sunburn, your grandma isn’t anemic, but your photos of them make them look like they do! It’s like that time I was a kid and I’d play with the “Tint” knob on my parents’ TV and made everyone look flushed or sick. So you want to correct the white balance of your photos, especially if you’re taking pics under that gawd-awful flourescent lighting!

The white balance is crucial in getting your photos to look as natural as possible — as if you were looking into a window to the other side. Now, there may be times when you don’t want this, like when you want sepia-toned photos or black & white photos but in general, you want natural-looking pics.

Most outdoor shots are pretty natural-looking but if you’re taking a photo where there’s a lot of green like a golf range or an outdoor garden, your average point-and-shoot camera will automatically overcompensate for that and make your pictures too green or maybe even too red. Most often, you’ll have a setting on your digital camera for setting the white balance automatically and I use this when I’m taking quick non-pro shots.

But if you want to do it more precisely, you’ll need a graycard — it can be picked up at any photo store and if you ask the people there, they’ll know what you’re talking about unless they’re complete idiots, then you walk out wondering why they work there. They’re the cheapest photography tool you’ll ever have to buy (like $10), and perhaps one of the most valuable ones you can add to your arsenal.

Ok, so here’s the down & dirty way to do it, not a lengthy explanation to prove my prowess in photoshop.

1. Take the picture you want with the graycard in the scene.
2. Then you take the shots that you want without the graycard.
3. Open up the pic with the graycard in it:
   
4. Get the color sampler tool (it’s under the eyedropper):
   
5. Click on the graycard in your photo
6. Look at the info window (Window > Info) — the RGB values of that point you clicked on shows:
   
   If the card was perfectly gray, all the values would be the same but they’re not — looks like this pic is a little red. Let’s pick a value that is between the mean and median — 130, for this example.
7. Create a new adjustment layer for Levels
8. Let’s go down the dropdown list — choose Red:
   
   You should see in the Info Window that there are an extra set of values and the value for Red changes as you slide the middle triangle back & forth:
   
   For this example, slide the triangle until you get as close to 130 as possible. Do this for Green and Blue.
9. To remove the color sampler from the picture, just drag it off your photo. Now you should have a photo that’s more color balanced:
   
   I picked a crappy example so you can only tell there’s a slight difference. If you see the difference, you get my approval.
10. You can now apply this Level to other pictures, just open that other photo and go to:
    Layer > Duplicate Layer > and choose the other photo from the dropdown.
    This should apply the Level you just created to the other photo:
    
    I work at a library.

Questions? Comments?
Next week: I’ll take a look at Picnik and some other online photo editors that you can use instead of Photoshop.

is this a national crisis? let them breathe through their nose and swallow the snot if it starts sliding back. I remember when I was a kid on the plane with my mom, we received pepper packets for our food. I wondered if I’d really sneeze if i took a whiff of pepper (they always do that in cartoons). So i poured some out in my hand and accidentally ended up snorting the pepper and well, it was just like in the cartoons! I started sneezing like crazy and my eyes watered and snot just dripped down my face with specks of pepper.

I asked my mom for some tissues. I didn’t ask her to suck the snot out of my nose. But that definitely would’ve helped me.

Speaking of snot & jelly-like things, I love jellyfish, and here’s a USB-powered jellyfish tank for your desk from AudioCubes and Jellyfish Pool Lights from Frontgate:

The USB Jellyfish Tank is so cool and realistic and they move around the tank and the light changes color! As you can see from this Youtube video, it’s very peaceful:

isn’t that so cool?! Too bad it’s way expensive @ $159.

What’s even more peculiar about the video is that it was made by an Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology. This Web 2.0 phenomenon is impacting everyone (who surfs the web or… is Korean). It’s one of my inspirations to learn XML. The problem is, I think I have like 4 computer books that I’m reading simultaneously right now and I’m just afraid I don’t have time to teach myself another language. Wouldn’t it be nice if you could get an online video course, and learn it at your leisure? Solution: Lynda.com.

It’s only $25/month, or $250/year (or $375 for premium membership) and you can view all their training videos if you wanted to in that time. Though there’s no way you’d be able view them all in a month (or even a year) because they have everything like PHP, XML, Photoshop, Flash, Dreamweaver, the list goes on! They have topics for beginners to advanced and if you get their premium membership, they also offer downloadable exercises. The first few videos in a series are free so you can get a taste for how they’re gonna teach it before buying into it.

btw, I don’t like the term “Web 2.0″ — nothing against ol’ Timmy or anything.

This is inevitable with any camera with a circular lens, and the angle will be different depending on where you’re standing (relative to the horizon line). It may not be apparent, and you may not even care, but if you’re like me and that sort of stuff drives you kinda crazy, here’s what you can do to fix it in Photoshop:

Filter > Distort > Lens Correction…

On the right-hand side, there should be a “Transform” section where you can play around with the Vertical and Horizontal Perspective. Keep in mind that when you do this, take the rest of the picture into consideration so that a section doesn’t become too “pinched.” You’ll also probably have to crop the photo a little bit to compensate for edges that are being tucked in. Hit OK and you’re done:

It’s amazing how the human eye can ignore this distortion when we’re at the scene and we still interpret the columns as being 90-degree vertical lines.

If you’re upgrading to WordPress 2.2 (or installing it fresh like I did), you may run into a problem where your dashboard is filled with “Forbidden - You don’t have permission to access /wp-admin/index-extra.php on this server” messages. Here’s the solution that fixed it for me. It also fixed the problem where I couldn’t add categories on the fly during posting and I couldn’t add categories when I was in the admin console.

according to whooami:

“IF YOU DO NOT HAVE an .htaccess in your wp-admin/ directory:
create a text file on your desktop:
put the following inside it:
<IfModule mod_security.c>
SecFilterInheritance Off
</IfModule>
save the file.
Upload the file to your wp-admin directory.
Rename the uploaded file to .htaccess (with the .)

IF YOU DO HAVE an .htaccess in your wp-admin/ directory:
Edit it:
<IfModule mod_security.c>
SecFilterInheritance Off
</IfModule>
save the new .htaccess”

worked like a charm for me.

I read this article about how Employee loyalty isn’t gone, it’s just different. Does it even exist? It comes down to being loyal to yourself, or loyal to your job. That line is fuzzy when you work, say, at a dry cleaners or a bronze casting studio where you work intimately with the bossman (or bosslady) and the work becomes personal. To me, I don’t like to alienate “work” from “self” which is what happens in most capitalistic societies. If you work, that “work” becomes a part of you, whether you like it or not because you’re investing a part of yourself into it, whether you’re a CEO or soldering circuits at a refrigeration company. No matter how much you may detest that work, you are claiming it as a part of who you are by putting your time into it. Capitalism turns us into a number that doesn’t matter who does the work, as long as it gets done… it makes us compartmentalize our selves more or less. If you don’t get what I mean, just read Marx’s theory of alienation:

“In a nutshell, Marx’s Theory of Alienation is the contention that in modern industrial production under capitalist conditions workers will inevitably lose control of their lives by losing control over their work. Workers thus cease to be autonomous beings in any significant sense.”

I’ve been fortunate enough to hold jobs that enriched my life instead of made myself feel more dead inside. If another job came along that offered me that personal satisfaction as well as paid me more, what should keep me from taking it? Nothing. Because I’m not a communist.

I went to a fabulous play today called The Four of Us by 1812 Productions (only $7.50). It totally inspired me to write a book or a play or start acting again… or go to more of these plays (which would be the easier alternative). The thing that struck me was that the audience members were 99.9% middle-to-upper class white people. Where did these people come from? Manayunk? City Line Ave? Cuz I sure as hell didn’t see any people from my block there.

“I should write a book,” is what everyone says. What makes them think they can write something so interesting? Oh, it’s just for self-satifaction, they say. Bullshit. “You know, I’d love it if it got out there but really, it’s just for me.” @_@ wtfe.

I should write a book. But seriously, if it took me this long to start a blog… yeah that book is never going to get done.

I so want this! The best idea ever (well, the best idea in the past 15 minutes)! For under $15, you can get this at lighterside.com. It’s super cute and would go great with your other mini-stuff.