A little something for V-day

Once again it's that time of year when all of us singles are lamenting the fact that we're sat home alone instead of HELPING SIMON PEGG CELEBRATE HIS GORRAM BIRTHDAY! Also something about Valentines, whatever those are.

In keeping with the spirit of this holiday (brought to you by all good gift cards manufacturers), here's a quick Photoshop doodle of something mushy, complete with instructions. Credit to F9Vision.com and NASA APOD for the source images used below.

I started with this easily-Googled picture of a red rose, which I found here:

Using the select colour range tool, I selected the white background, then used "select inverse" to select the rose itself. I found I had to contract the selection by 1px to remove the last bits of white from the edges of the image. I then copied and pasted this selection as a new layer in a new image with a plain black background:

My next step was to make the background more interesting, so I used a picture of the (topical) Rosette Nebula from NASA's APOD site (which you should go check out just as soon as you're done reading this).

Since the nebula image was quite a bit larger than the rose, I was free to let this new layer overlap the edges of the canvas, which let me play with the size and positioning of it a bit more. I used the burn and sharpen tools on the leaves to give them a bit of extra definition.

The next step was to add a glow around the edges of the rose. I copied the rose layer and used the colour overlay option from the layer styles menu to add a pale pink overlay to the image:

To make it look like a proper glow, I duplicated this pink layer and used a Gaussian blur filter with radius 3px on the top layer, and 6px on the bottom.

The next step was to add some stars in front of the rose. I used a plain circular brush with radius 4px and dotted a few stars onto a new layer in the foreground of the image:

The problem with these stars is they don't quite match up with the ones in the background. See those blurry "X"-shaped lines by the background stars? There's a long, boring explanation for why they appear when you look at distant objects through a telescope, but for now all we need to know is how to make our own.

To make things easier I hid every layer except the stars layer and the black background; then I used the magic wand tool to select the space around the stars. Inverting the selection gave me a nice neat selection around every star. I contracted the selection by 1px, and copied and pasted this into another layer, which I called "Stars blur".

I duplicated this layer and applied a motion blur filter with depth 10px and angle 45 degrees to one layer, and depth 10px and angle -45 degrees to the other layer. The result was this:

Bring back all the other layers, and we have our finished image:

And it really is that simple. Happy Valentines everyone!

Aliens invade Brighton! A not-quite Photoshop tutorial

This isn't really intended as a tutorial; it's more of a reminder for myself in case I ever want to do anything like this again. That said, if you're reading this I hope it gives you a few ideas!

Two things prompted this: Firstly, I snapped an unexpectedly good photo of sunset on the Brighton seafront on my phone. Secondly, I finally got a replacement for my ancient XP monolith and wanted to see what it could do.

A couple of credits before I get the ball rolling: to TTGxBoeing for this excellent alien invasion tutorial, which I have to credit as my original inspiration for this piece. Secondly, to Fabio Sasso for his tutorial on creating fireballs and explosions. These two between them gave me pretty much everything I needed to create the above scene. The tank image I sourced here, and is hosted on armyrecognition.com.

So, the original photo:

I was really happy with how this came out, but I can never resist fiddling with a good thing. My initial reaction was that there were a few too many people out for leisurely walks - that kid in particular looks a bit too chilled for someone watching his hometown get blown up. So I disposed of them with a combination of clone brush and spot healing tools:

Next, the spaceships. I had this image left over from a previous project:

I decided on 3 spaceships covering a range of distances from the viewer. (See the little one over Shoreham, up the coast to the left?) The next thing I needed to do was get rid of that pesky dude with the kid's bicycle. He was too big for the clone brush or the spot healer, so I used a tank:

I had to do some fiddling around with the brightness and contrast to get the tank looking like it belonged in the scene. I also created a new layer for the bench in the foreground, and while I was at it did the same for that lamppost in front of the central spaceship. The shadow of the tank actually came from another image of the same machine from a different angle, silhouetted and distorted to look like a shadow. (Actually when looking up the credit for that image I realised it's a model of the tank made by Tamiya, Inc.)

With the tank in place, it was time to start blowing stuff up. I started with the smaller spaceship to the right:

This is where I started using the tutorials I linked above. You can find full details of these effects there so I won't go into them at length here. I duplicated the beam and smoke from the larger spaceship and reused them for the smaller one to the left of the picture. As with the bench by the tank, I created a new layer for the Mercure Motel since it needed to appear in front of all that smoke.

Now, time to start in on the centrepiece of the action! I started by creating a more detailed beam effect below the central spaceship:

I decided to make the lightning interact with some of the objects in the street around it, like the bus stop. I originally had it interacting with the lamppost next to the impact as well, but this interfered with the later smoke effect. Speaking of which:

I also added some smoke around the tank (having cropped out the smoke that was present in the original image). I did this using the same brush I used for the smoke columns, but at a larger size and much lower opacity. I then decided to include a shockwave effect around my central explosion:

To create this effect, I created a circular marquee around the impact point and temporarily flattened the layers, copying the selection into a new image. In that image I then used a Spherize filter on the circular selection and copied the result back into my main image as a new layer. Using the layer styles palette, I used the Outer and Inner glow settings (I found using Blend Mode: Screen and a low opacity worked best) to create the edges of the shockwave. Finally, I copied the sign in front of the blast into a new layer to keep it in the foreground.

With all the main effects in place, it was time for a few finishing touches:

I copied the tank, shadow and smoke layers into a new layer and used a second tank to eclipse the last few pesky civilians left in the picture. I also darkened the sky by taking a rough selection, feathering by 100px and going nuts with the Brightness/Contrast adjustment.

The final step was to add an adjustment layer over everything to apply a gradient map for a bit of extra atmosphere (which had the additional benefit of adding consistency to the lighting of all the elements in the photo):

And there you have it - if aliens ever do invade Brighton, it might look something like this!

I'll probably be tweaking this image for the next few weeks as I find bits of it I think I could do better, so if you have any suggestions or questions please get in touch!

(Edit: just discovered this is apparently a thing!)

Why this new Twitter trend needs to stop before it starts

Some of you might have been aware last week that Donald Trump made a bit of a fool of himself by retweeting a photo of Fred and Rosemary West, after user @feckhead asked him to share a photo of "My parents who passed away". The media jumped on this as an excuse to hold off on reporting any real news and promptly crucified Trump in the headlines.

Apparently some Twitter users found all this so hilarious that they just had to try it again, this time conning Billy Ray Cyrus into retweeting a picture of Jimmy Saville.

Here's why this really needs to not be a thing.

Firstly, (and I am absolutely going to take Donald Trump's side on something, so brace yourselves), a person's first reaction when being sent a complimentary tweet from what appears to be a grieving son is not to Google the fucking picture. The reason the first reaction is not to Google the fucking picture is that it might not turn up anything if the picture is of someone famous (like Fred and Rose West) and definitely won't if the picture actually is of poor @feckhead's dear old mum and dad. So even the most cautious of users could potentially fall for this.

Secondly, it's not funny. The joke here is that Trump and Cyrus didn't recognise heinous criminals who gained infamy in countries that, and I cannot stress this enough, Trump and Cyrus don't live in. The concept of world news as it's done in Britain is by no means a global thing - our country is small enough that we have to report on external affairs just to keep the news interesting; America isn't. The US news rarely reports on stories outside the US border unless they directly affect the US, so the fact that Trump and Cyrus had no idea who the people in the photos are is completely understandable. It'd be like mocking a citizen of North Korea for not recognising Che Guevara on one of those ubiquitous T-shirts. They've never been exposed to that knowledge, so all you're achieving by poking fun is to make yourself look like a raging douchenozzle.

Thirdly, as mentioned above it gives the media an easy out to generate ratings without actually reporting anything of substance. It's an excuse to run a week'#s worth of "FAMOUS PERSON MAKES A MISTAKE" headlines that distract from anything of substance going on at the time (seriously, click that link). The media has grown profoundly lazy in recent years, and will happily pander to the lowest common denominator in a quest for ratings. They need to be given as few excuses for this as possible.

Finally, this "trend" needs to stop before it starts for the sake of everyone out there who actually does want to do a bit of good every now and then. Trump's retweet was meant with good intentions, I'm sure. Okay, a cynical mind would call it a publicity stunt but would that really matter, had feckhead truly been a son in grief? I think not. It's a good thing that people are willing to engage in such tiny acts of kindness towards one another, and the great thing about the Internet age is that now such acts can transcend such concerns as class and national boundaries and allow anyone to reach out to their role models, and for those role models to reach back.

This whole debacle makes everyone that bit more guarded about such things (as arguably it should) and makes such acts that bit less likely to occur. That's not making the world a better place for anyone, so for feck's sake cut it out.

Why legal downloads have put me off legal downloads: a rant

Right off the bat, let me own up to writing a sensationalised headline for the sake of making it sound snappy. What I'm actually going to be writing (ranting) about today is UltraViolet. Not the atrocious Milla Jovovitch movie of 2006, or the comic books on which it was based, but the cloud-based licensing system that all the cool kids (movie studios) seem to be using these days to allow disc-free access to their content, be it in the form of downloads or online streaming. In theory it sounds like a great idea, and something I'd like to see more of - making content more easily available and playable on a range of devices, allowing consumers to enjoy the content they've bought (or bought access to, if we're being pedantic) as and when they wish.

In practice, however, I've spent the last hour setting up three separate accounts (UltraViolet, Sony Pictures and Flixster), installing three separate applications on my computer (the Sony Pictures download manager and two versions of Microsoft Silverlight, because the first one Sony linked me to was out of date), and for the last 45 minutes I've had a download of The Amazing Spiderman running which as I type is not even halfway complete. Currently the Sony Pictures account is refusing to accept the password I just set it up with, and the "forgot password" link isn't working either. The site advises me to contact customer support, but they've all gone home for the day.

Okay, so this is really more of a rant about Sony than about UltraViolet, but it's still a hell of a hassle when you consider I could just torrent copies of the movies (which, I remind you, I have already paid for), and they would download faster and play on a wider range of devices. Oh, and I could back them up as many times as I liked without encountering DRM problems. This is the problem with the current legal offerings in the download market - they still expect their audience to pay exorbitant prices for content while forcing us to install all kinds of crap and endure all kinds of hassle if we wish to access it in anything other than a 20th-century fashion (i.e. by putting a disc in a player and watching the film the old-fashioned way). The film industry is a collection of businesses whose business model has evolved very little in the last 50 years and is still incredibly resistant to change. In an era when technology is evolving faster than ever, is it any wonder these companies are losing so much money (still nowhere near what they claim, but undoubtedly some) to piracy? No, it really isn't.

So, to the film studios I make this plea. For heaven's sake make downloading as easy, quick and hassle-free as the illegal alternatives. I don't mind having to pay for the films I watch - I realise they cost a lot of money to make and that that money has to come from somewhere, and I really don't mind being the source of some of that funding if the payoff is I get to keep watching great movies. What I'm not cool with though is paying to be inconvenienced by your ridiculously backward systems. I know all this bullshit exists for the purpose of making piracy as unattractive as possible, but you're accomplishing the exact reverse.

YAAAARRRRR!

They don't make 'em like they used to...

Another short post tonight as it's been a very long day!

I've recently rediscovered the cartoon series Animaniacs. I was a massive fan of this show as a kid, so I was very excited to discover that like all good (and otherwise) things, there are a bunch of videos of it on Youtube. After watching a few of these as an adult though, I can't help but feel there was more going on in these cartoons than I realised as a child. Here's a video with a few examples of what I mean:

Yeah. Somehow I get the feeling that jokes like these wouldn't make it past the censors these days, and if they did the production company would immediately be lynched by the combined forces of Mumsnet and the Daily Mail. To be honest, I'm amazed some of these ("Finger Prince") were ever broadcast at all. And yet, for all the shock factor we feel at the idea of children being exposed to this kind of filth (helpfully highlighted by Yakko's cheerful "Goodnight everybody!" so you know you've missed something), I would submit that it hasn't done me any harm, and that I was able to continue my childhood blissfully unaware that I'd even seen anything wrong. What's more, I now get to re-watch some very well-written cartoons (also something of a rare breed these days) in the knowledge that I'm getting more out of them as an adult than I ever did as a child. The modern obsession with sanitising the lives of our children will deprive the next generation of the fun I've been experiencing over the last few days, and I think that's a real shame.

Nothing to say, so here's some awesomeness

I had something awesome and relevant to write about, but for the life of me I can't remember what it was. So in lieu of anything better to say today, I'm going to share a couple of things with you. Firstly, this song, which has been stuck in my head ever since I first heard it:

Secondly, this site, which was shared by a friend on Facebook and amused me greatly. If links aren't your thing, the site poses the simple question, "What if Pacific Rim was based in the UK?" and is basically an excuse for using Warner Bros' build-a-Jaeger web game (not suitable for slower connections/computers) to come up with some very British giant asskicking robots. Naturally I've made my own, and here it is:

Yeah. Now go check out the site, which is much funnier.

...And now I've remembered what I meant to write about originally. Something about payday loans. I think I'll save that one for when I'm feeling more awake. 'Til next time then!

Facebook's censorship hypocrisy

Facebook's censorship policies have been in the news again recently. This latest row is the result of several videos of people being decapitated. These are (somehow) not in violation of Facebook's community standards, and the site resisted initial pressure to have them removed, only caving when the media started reporting on the story. Their initial reasoning for leaving the video online was that it was being shared in the spirit of condemnation of the actions depicted in the video, and that Facebook respects "people's rights to describe, depict and comment on the world in which we live". While this statement makes a great soundbite for the site, it is clearly shown to be false when considering how the site enforces its existing censorship policies.

My main beef here is that there seems to be a world of difference in the strictness of the policy when applied to different types of content. Let's look at those community standards again. The guide on hate speech acknowledges a distinction between serious and humorous speech, allowing purveyors of "bad taste" jokes a platform while (theoretically) filtering out the worst excesses of hate groups. In practice however, the distinction between serious and humorous speech is not so easily made, especially over the Internet where a person's intended meaning can easily be misinterpreted by others. In this instance Facebook seems to err on the side of leniency when filtering content, and rightly so - while jokes about dead babies may be grossly offensive to many people, this alone is not reason enough to instigate a policy of censorship. Facebook's policy on phishing and spam is taken equally lightly - to be honest, I was surprised to find this included in their community standards at all. While I find unsolicited spam annoying, I can understand why it's there - Facebook is a business, and the first priority of any business is to make a profit, so fair play.

One of their community standards which is taken seriously is "nudity and pornography". The rule here seems to be no nipples (if female), and nothing in the crotch area, though pretty much anything else goes. (It's worth noting that Facebook makes a specific exemption for breastfeeding photos.) This is probably what gets me the most about the lopsidedness of their censorship policy. The argument most often brought up in the interests of censorship (apart from the "offense" point, which I don't respect enough to consider an argument) is that Facebook's minimum age limit is 13, meaning potentially anyone of this age with a Facebook account can access anything posted on Facebook. What I don't understand here is how nipples are more damaging to a child's development than videos of decapitation or extreme violence; though the decapitation videos have been removed, there's plenty of other violent content on the site (don't worry, that link doesn't point to them). To understand my problem here, take a look at these pictures:

It took a surprisingly long time to find a photo of Femen that didn't include swearing.

The one on the left is copied directly from Facebook, and is a fairly vanilla example. The one on the right I had to source from Google images and is apparently too extreme for Facebook. That particular photo is taken from a French news site and is hardly pornographic in nature (unless you're really missing the point). Now consider our hypothetical 13-year-old again. A lot of children would be upset by the image of a dead animal - could the same really be said of boobs? Most of us are, after all, exposed to boobs from an early age. That's not to say that Facebook should start allowing hardcore pornography on its site, especially in the absence of any kind of age-verification wall, but to ban images such as the above on the same grounds is just silly.

I think the root cause here is what is considered appropriate varies from country to country, and Facebook is very much an American creation. America has always been somewhat lenient concerning depictions of violence in the media, but much less so when it comes to anything sexual. I have no idea why, perhaps something to do with the country's Christian roots, but that's the way it's always been. However, a (supposedly) international and modern institution like Facebook can and should be more mature about these things. Did I mention Femen have a Facebook group? They have to censor all their own photos to stop Facebook taking them down.

My point here is that Facebook needs to have a serious rethink about their censorship policy, and what they consider to be okay for their website. Certainly, when images such as that Femen protest photo need to be censored they can't claim to respect depictions of "the world in which we live" without reeking of rank hypocrisy. Jeremie Zimmerman makes an excellent point in the article I referenced earlier - "Since Facebook collects and stores so much information it should be able to determine when one of its members is a minor and is about to be exposed to content that has been reported as unsuitable, and display a warning message". I would go one step further - if a user is a minor in their country (let's not forget that different countries have different definitions of this), they should be barred from seeing certain content. This reduces the amount of censorship needed on the site while protecting children from age-inappropriate content. While debate may rage on exactly what this entails, a simple "mature content" flag on photos or videos such as the ones discussed in this blog would suffice to quell the criticism of Facebook almost entirely. Moreover, the more content Facebook hosts, the more options they have for making money from it. One can only wonder why they haven't implemented a system like this already.