PewPew 2.0 - Blogs about photoshop

Experiments with IE6 and Alpha .PNG Solutions.

One of the things that I've been busy doing is working a new article. IE6 (and lower) .PNG Experiments is a series of tests of various solutions for the grey background that appears on .PNGs with alpha transparencies in Internet Explorer 6 (or lower).

The really important part of this article is the major drawbacks to any solution that is based on using the AlphaImageLoader filter. In short, doing so caused hard lockups of IE6 that some serious Microsoft ninjas were unable to resolve. My very strong recommendations is that you use a graphic-based solution such as using Fireworks to add an alternate color palette to the image, or simply re-matting the image against the desired background color.

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Got Mac.

My Macbook Air came this week. It's just as delightfully slim and just as sleek as you'd imagine. I got Firefox installed with only a bit of trouble. This may be obvious to you Mac users, but I was confused when Firefox wanted me to drag it to the fonts folder. Turns out, that's not the fonts folder — that's the applications folder.

But it's not all chocolate and roses with the Macbook Air either. We did have trouble installing the CS3 Master Collection. You see, there's no optical drive on the MacBook Air. So we connected my Macbook Air to the husband's Macbook over the network, so as to borrow the husband's Macbook's DVD drive. Unfortunately, this made the CS3 installer (which normally runs like molasses) about as slow as ...something really slow. Since it was so slow, I quit babysitting, and did some dishes. When I came back, both Macs had fallen asleep. I started them back up, but the installer kept insisting that it couldn't find CS3 Disc One. The husband did some magic with his USB hard drive, and he eventually got the install completed, but the Installer said there was a problem with Photoshop, and we should re-install.

Long story short, here's my advice should you need to install CS3 (or any of it's components) onto your Macbook Air via Drive Sharing: Do not let either Air or other Macbook fall asleep. Babysit them, or disable all of the power saving options until the install is complete. Be sure you've got the computers connected to power.

An even better option is, if you have a USB hard drive, use it to make disk images with your other Mac, hook the USB drive the to the Macbook Air, and then install from those disc images. It's going to be a lot quicker that way.

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The Year in Review.

I 2007, I got very very good at CSS. I considered myself a CSS beginner at the beginning of the year, and now I'm certainly an advanced CSS coder, with a focus on flexible, semantic, standards based, accessible code.

We added the Wii to our collection of consoles. We had to stand in line for it, but it was "free" since we used some gift cards earned through Visa Points to buy it. I later sold the GameCube and GBA Player on Craigslist.

I now understand the basics of football (American football). I understand downs, and point structure, and can even recognize when a team might want to go for two on the extra point. (There's actually some interesting math occasionally.) I'm even getting excited about the post-season. Since I'm a Seattlite now, I'm feeling a strong loyalty towards our home team Seahawks.

We bought a new townhouse in summer. The best $600 we ever spent was on paying movers to haul our furniture and boxes out of the old apartment, up two flights of stairs, into the truck, and then up 3 more flights of stairs at the new townhouse. Doing so made moving day tiring, but not impossible.

I did a lengthy study on IE6 solutions for alpha transparency .PNGs, and tutorial for easy .GIF creation in Photoshop. This probably bored to tears those of you whom I know in real life, but it does bring in one Google click a month or so.

We finally got our kittens. We do try not to be crazy cat-people.

I started learning Silverlight. I am beginning to feel competent with it. Hopefully next year I can report that I'm moderately skilled with it.

Recently, I've been working on a new backend for Pew Pew Laser Blog. A significant part of the work is done, but I need to finish some features still, and make it a bit safer from hackers. But I promise, and upgrade is coming! Tags, databases, Google Ads, comments! It'll be pretty frickin sweet. I guess I better be getting back to work on that...

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Photoshop Small Image Enlarging - Addendum.

After reviewing the previous entry, I must agree that the 4x truffle doesn't look very good at all. Also, I completely screwed up the size attributes, so there was some browser resizing occurring. Mea culpa. I offer the same method applied to a truffle enlarged to only twice it's original size.

And here is a truffle enlarge to only 1.5 times it's original size. That's not too shabby, and probably the best we can do without getting a source vector image or re-creating the truffle.

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Photoshop Small Image Enlarging - 10x and Blur Hac

Suppose you have a lovely little image, such as the one shown at right. You'd really like that image just a bit larger in dimension, but you don't have the source vector image. How do you enlarge it while minimizing the artifacts and jagged edges? These steps will walk you through a procedure for enlarging the image using Photoshop.

The simplest way to enlarge an image is to select Image, and then Image Size from Photoshop's menus. Enter new height and width that you'd like, and blammo - you've got an enlarged image. The image at right has been enlarged to 4 times it's original size. But all those jagged edges sure look ugly. So instead, try the slightly more complex method.

Instead, first enlarge the image to 10 times what you'd like the resulting size to be. So, in this example, open the height and width to 1280 pixels for both height and width in the Image Size dialog box. (1280 is 4 times 10 times 32 - desired size times 10 times original size.) Then, to smooth things up a bit, add a Gausian Blur the the super huge image. To do so, from the Filter menu, select Blur and then select Gaussian Blur. For this example, set the pixels to 20, and then click OK. (You'll want to try different values to find the best setting for your image.) Then use the Image Size dialog to set the height and width down to the desired result - 128 pixels each in this example. The result of this is shown a right.

The image resulting from the new 10x and Blur method is not prefect - for that you'd need a vector source graphic. But it certainly is less jagged than otherwise. Enlarging an image to 4 times it's original size is a bit excessive. I've gotten pretty good results by enlarging images to as much as twice their size.

Do you like the original image shown here? You can get your own truffle, and many more, at Iconbuffet.

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