Another Two Images In One

A friend of mine wanted me to make that kind of double-image of him too. Here it is:

An Advertisement Idea Pt.2

I have another advertisement idea. Yesterday I posted that image that looks different, depending on your viewing distance. This has some commercial potential.

How about an ad like this:
(Click the images to enlarge them.)
To emphasize what it would look like, I took the illusion part off. So when you are far away, it would look like this:
But as you get closer, the product and the logo kinda blurs away and another image appears:
This would be great on highways, bus stops and such. Where ever people are going towards, not only passing by sideways, but going towards the ad.

The image of the girl is some random image somewhere I got with Google image search. If you own the copyright, or are that girl in the picture, and want me to remove the image, please don't hesitate to contact me. This is just a rough draft, to get the idea through, so for me it really doesn't matter.

Also, if you are in advertisement company, and like the idea, and perhaps even want to use it, please do contact me.

Two Images In One

I saw an image that looks like one thing when you're close and other thing when you're further away. I planned to do one meself.

This is my first try on this one, but it still does the trick somehow. Have to better this technique more. How I did it:

What we need:
2 Images. Close-up larger than 1000px, Far away a bit smaller.
1 Photoshop
1 New Image that is something like 1000-1200px in size.
1 End result image, 130px wide and 220 high, 72dpi. (Screen)

How:
1. Take two images that are similar, put them on their own layers. The one you want to be seen when you're close should be on top, higher resolution / quality and sharper.
2. Desaturate them both. - Or if you want color images, then do desired color corrections, brightness, etc.
3. Take the top layer and align the major parts of it with the bottom one. Or vice versa. Adjust scaling when necessary.
4. For bottom layer, we only run Filter/Blur/Gaussian... on something like 10. A lot of it. That's about it for this layer.
5. Top layer. First, run Filter/Sharpen/Sharpen Edges and Filter/Sharpen/Sharpen More one or two times. (Not really necessary.)
6. We need to highlight the edges of the image. Do Filter/Other/High-Pass. Adjust so you see sharp edges, but still quite low contrast.
7. Just a tiny bit of Filter/Artistic/Poster Edges filter. Lowest settings on thickness and intensity. Posterization quite high.
8. Select all, copy, deselect all. (CTRL and then A, C, D.)
9. Add a mask to the layer, paste the clipboard to the mask, invert. If there's parts that stick out when you Zoom out from the image and look closer and further away, then fix it with brush on the mask. Like in the image I made, there's the edges of the hat in the close-up image that made the image you see when you're further away look like a turban. So I wanted to emphasize the forehead and the cut in the hair. I went to the mask, took a soft brush, opacity something like 20%. Painted on the edges of the hat, and the shape of the hairline of the blurred image on the backround and the part where background image's hair makes that V shape curve on top. Brushing them slightly darker made the background image to shine up a bit more.
10. Zoom the image so it's like about something in the range of... 200px? The smaller it is, less far you need to go to see the other image. So not bigger than about 200-300 if you plan to see it while standing in the same room. And Zoom in to see the image you want to be seen when you're close. Alternate between Zoom in and Zoom out, saves a lot of walking.

Balance between steps 9 and 10 until it's ready.

11. Last part. Resize the image to something like 100-200 wide and 200-300 high (portrait) or vice versa if landscape.

This is what I just figured out after looking at those images today... well, it's 00:57 at the moment, so yesterday... Anyways, so if some photoshop pro guru has any tutorials for this, I'd appreciate. Interesting stuff. Any idea what to call these images?

Amsterdam Police Recruit Ad

I saw this ad in the newspaper today:
It's a recruitment ad of the Amsterdam-Amstelland police forces. A question arose. Why this image on it? What do they want to communicate with this image?

Revealing Anonymity

I don't get the whole point of finding out who some random anonymous blogger is. OK, what if we find out one blogger is called Desmond? Does this validate whatever he says more that if his name would be Charles? And after someone has searched the whole net and driven to the person's house to take pictures and finally gets his reward by revealing Charles' or Desmond's identity, then what? What did you gain? What are you going to do with that information?

Dalai Lama was in USA recently. Does it matter if one point is made by either George or Dalai, if you agree with the point? Or do you need to have a person behind your opinions? Is this to say, that people rather agree with people they like, rather than make their own opinions and valuate other opinions based on their own values and morals?

For example, I do not agree with Hitler's idea of the world. (Oh no! Godwin! Godwin! I lost!) But I do agree with his idea of social security. I do agree with the maternity leave. I do agree with highways instead of horse carriage paths when there's lots of traffic. (Although the amount of cars we have now is not so good. Especially if China starts to promote "2 cars in every household" theme...) But see, even Hitler did things I agree with. And I don't like that person. Not one bit. I agree with those points, not with the person. I'm that strong of a person, I can do that. Easily. Can you? So for me it doesn't matter who invented social security or maternity leave, I think those are good ideas.

I am able to process information and draw my own conclusions. I do not need an authoritative figure to tell me how to think. Therefore I can take any idea, any opinion, and decide whether I like it or not regardless of the inventor of that particular idea. It doesn't matter whether the inventor lives in Ohio, USA or Goa, India. It's the message that matters. Even if I know the location and identity of someone who's blogging, it doesn't matter for me unless I know the person in real life or plan to meet with this person. Being anonymous is a sign of "no, I don't want to know you in real life" so I leave those people alone. Yes, they are my dancing monkeys while writing the blog, but their private life is private.

But if you still get some satisfaction of finding out people's identities, don't worry. Just start to promote subcutaneous RFIDs and TCPA. If we manage to get both mandatory, you don't need to go through all this hustle just to find out Alfred Russel's real name.

Of course, exclusion. If someone tells me that something is a fact, I want to check it. If someone writes an opinion, I don't need to know the authority behind, but if someone writes "the speed of light can be exceeded" I want to see some proof and I want to know who is this guy and what makes him think this is possible. If someone writes "I think the speed of light is stupid", I don't need to know who that person is. It's an opinion. I can process this information regardless who this person is. It's not a hard fact we need to accept so I can take it as an opinion, instead of a study of facts.

Yet, the biggest questions remain: Why and so what?

Why would you find out who is this man of mystery?
What does this give you?
What difference does it make if you know the identity of someone?
Why do you need to know someones identity to agree/disagree with any given idea?
Can you agree with an idea if you don't like the person who came up with the idea?

Holiday Pictures For Me Mum And Dad

I was recently in Germany for a week visiting an old friend. Used to share a house in another country with him.

German forests are beautiful, but one very interesting this is the witch-circles. Mushrooms that grow in circles.


A strong stream.


We found a psychedelic looking treestump.


...had to take a posing picture too. What a loser!


We were actually looking for Steinpilz (Herkkutatti, Porcini, Boletus edulis) mushrooms. And found them!


All images are his copyright, but he wishes to stay anonymous.

I'm Honoured By A VA Fansite

As I've mentioned earlier, I read Violent Acres. Sometimes I write to Violentacrestalk.com (which includes the word stalk, by the way) and just noticed, they have honoured me with a quote of mine.

Thank you, the admin of Violentacrestalk.

A T-Shirt Idea

A T-Shirt idea. Just need to find a print shop and print it for meself.

(Hope you get it.)

More info, added 12th of October:

Close up of the image to see the colors:

(Click on the image for larger view.)



Incredients:
Photoshop
Illustrator
Some small clipart of couple dancing tango (livetraced).
Some small clipart of a palm tree (livetraced).
The font is a free Partridge with a bit of extra italics.

Objects done in Illustrator and brought to Photoshop for composition. Objects are Smart Objects, so they will retain their vector properties for scaling. At the moment the orig. image is A4 landscape size with 300dpi, but can be scaled to any size. (Ah, the beauty of vectors.) I know I could've done it solely in Illustrator - but I like Photoshop.

Watchmen The Movie

Among other things I enjoy comic books and comic-book-to-movie conversions even if those are comic-books I don't read meself. But there's so many movies coming, especially after Spider-Man & X-Men, when all the Marvel comics are being filmed. But I found a comic-book-to-be-a-movie worth advertising!

Watchmen

One of the best super-hero comics I've read. (And I normally prefer Marvel over DC...)

But my comic book taste is more towards European comics, Belgium of course, but others as well, like Italian, and Eastern-European - say, like Enki Bilal. (Who's movie Immortal was quite a disappointment.)