My Nikon Coolpix2100 is a pretty good digital camera: A decent 2 megapixels in pretty damn small package. Good for snapshots, but not anything bigger than a 5×7 print. It’s pretty powerful, but still limited. It’s somewhat annoying, so I’ve worked on my Photoshop skills to compensate.

Shots often end up dark, with heavy yellows and oranges, plus the noise you find on these types of digicams. I haven’t gotten a perfect method down yet, but I’ll try to figure it out and put an article up someday. For now, here’s a side by side of my most recent photomanip (thumbnails are low quality, click to enlarge):

Hannah in a car on a snowy day
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• I first used Photoshop’s “Auto Color” function, improving the colours quite a bit.
• Moved on to the teeth. Hannah has very nice pearly whites in real life, but my digicam has a bad habit of turning everything orangy-yellow.
  • Traced the outside of them using the pen tool.
  • Fillied the path in with white on a new layer.
  • Gaussian blurred it about 5 pixels.
  • Set the layer blend mode to “Hue”
  • Lowered the opacity to about 50%

  This returned the teeth back to their natural non-plaquey look.

• And finally, the finish and polish
  • Flattened the image and duplicated it onto a new layer
  • Gaussian blurred the new layer about 10 pixels
  • Set the layer blend mode to “Screen” giving the whole image a glow halo-ish effect (Brings out Hannah’s nice complexion)
  • Tweaked the colours a bit in the blue bluer direction to offset the oranges.

I think the change is pretty significant. Try opening the images in two tabs or windows and switching back and forth.

I slept over at Hannah’s house, and it was super-great. We drove around in the snow for a while and I took a picture:

Earlier this week, I was handed a form entitled “Junior/Senior Course Selection Form 2005/2006″

Tonite, I looked at it and tried to figure it out, trying to remember the various requirements, which ones I had fulfilled, and which ones I hadn’t. Trying to decide what each of the courses would truely be like.

School isn’t supposed to be like this. School is supposed to be friendly, loving, and simple. Just learning and friends, that’s it. I guess though, that’s not true. School is a machine.