Monthly Archives: November 2004

Levels Tool – white, black and grey to the rescue!

Everyone who’s done any processing of photos will know about the Auto button of their Colour Level tool. It’s something that probably appears in every decent photo manipulation application and it’s invaluable for correcting colour casts on photos. Unfortunately it doesn’t always work very well.
The GIMP offers 3 buttons next to the Auto function and with these three buttons it’s possible to pick out elements of the image under examination that are either black, white, or grey! Click the white button, then click an area of the photo that should be white. Do the same for grey and black if needs be.
I only (re?)discovered how useful these were this evening when I was trying to colour correct a photo taken indoors, but with the white-balance set to "cloudy". The picture appeared too rich, Auto levels made it green but by clicking the white button and then on a fridge in the background the photo was suddenly almost perfect! I’m not going to post that image but here are two I made earlier…

Local History, Global Reach

Iniscarra Cemetery, just a few miles from where I work, holds the remains of one "Mary William, daughter of John Stewart of Belfast. Wife of the very reverend Theophilius Blakely, Dean of Down". She’s also the mother of Captain Theophilus Alexander Blakely, a prolific designer of rifled cannon and the inscription on the side of his mother’s tomb bears witness to that:

Mother of Captain Blakely Royal Artillery. Original inventor of improvements in cannon and the greatest artillerist of the age.

A quick search proved useful and it was sobering to find a connection between my locality and the American Civil War!

The Digital Journalist – November 2004

The latest issue of the excellent The Digital Journalist is out now! There’s a feature presentation on body painting and tatoos, South Africa plus an opinion piece by James Colburn entitled, “Don’t Ask”.

I hate to tell you this, but we’re screwed. By “we” I don’t just mean photojournalists but journalists in general. And not just the select few that cover the White House but journalists all over the country. You are going to see less, hear less and be able to report less.

WordPress WYSIWYG

I just installed the WYSIWYG plugin for WordPress and it’s nice. I don’t think I’d use it myself but it could be very useful for newbies, especially by using the Image Manager to insert images into posts! It took only a small amount of hacking to get it to recognise the WPMU directory structure!
Problems – in Moz FF I couldn’t paste into the textarea as I got a "security error" popup. Inserting a link was problematic too – I had to get out of html view and add the <a href=""></a> bit myself!

Building Rich DHTML User Interfaces Revisited

This post by John Lim is a must-read for any web developer looking to develop a “rich client” on their sites.
He lists several tools and libraries to help in the process and I really like the look of JPSpan although it looks like I need to download it from the sourceforge CVS as there’s no tarball yet. I must have a play with it later as XmlHttpRequest looks dead useful!

From WordPress to Wordform – WordPress Review

Shelley wrote an impressive review of WordPress a few days ago and as she mentioned an entry here I noticed a few hits. It’s a long piece with lots of comments and interesting. I changed the method by which enclosures are created – from a text field to scanning the post for URLs. Many of the comments aren’t very positive about that change. Which is better?

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