Posts by Luke
Freelensing
What is Freelensing? Photos taken with the lens detached from the camera but held in place and moved around to focus. This also lets extra light in sometimes causing light leaks and giving a vintage look and feel. Freelensing can also: Give extra bokeh by shrinking the area in focus (aperture is 0) Allow for [...]
Opera 10 tip: remove tab resizer
Edit: Oops – there’s actually a much simpler way. Right click on the tab area > Customize > Enable thumbnails in tabs The Opera 10 beta has introduced a new tab feature that lets you resize tabs and expand them to show a full thumbnail. You can either click and drag it down, or middle [...]
Boston Public Library (Great Resource)
If you’re looking for some inspiration, the Bostom Public Library has a fantastic Flickr account with lots of classic posters. They’re all licensed under Creative Commons and for available at a reasonable size (unlike many similar resources). I really love the style of these old travel posters. The colours they’ve used and the hand-painted texture [...]
MSN Live Messenger to Illustrator
If you’re anything like me, you can often communicate better visually with images, rather than text. When chatting on MSN with my trusty Wacom tablet, often half the conversation is in drawings, especially when the other person enjoys drawing as much as I do. The problem with these drawn-conversations is that it can be difficult [...]
Project 365 – the first 4 months
My Project 365 is going well – haven’t missed a day so far. January February March April
2009 Calendar
I decided to participate in Project 365 this year. Only 5 days in and I can already see it’s going to be difficult to keep track of which number day it is in the year. You can see my Project 365 photos here. I meant to get myself a calendar today but forgot, so I [...]
Wallpaper: Colour Wood
The wallpaper I’ve been using on a couple of computers for the past couple of months is “Darker Wood” by PaulEnsane. It’s a very soothing, neutral and natural wallpaper. While I’ve been happily using it, I wanted something with a bit more colour, but still with the natural wood. I stumbled across this colourful wallpaper, [...]
Fire photo: Get a white background in 3 steps
Occasionally for a print or website, you might require images with a white background. Usually these are easy to find, take or mask yourself, but for some things it can be more difficult. Fire is one example. It would be very difficult to try and mask out flames from a fire photo using the pen [...]
GIMP Tutorial – Textured Text
Time for another GIMP tutorial. This time based on the Photoshop Textured Text tutorial. In this one I blend the text with a wood background. This technique is very useful in general. For example you can use it for blending objects into a background or for making a grungy text font. Watch below or in [...]
Pirate [Windows, Apple, Ubuntu] Wallpaper Series
I’ve built up quite a collection of this Pirate series of wallpapers, so I thought it would be good to have a central point to put them all. Any requests, let me know in the comments. Here’s the list so far: Pirate Windows wallpaper