Senior Portrait Photomanip Magic

misc, personal

One occasionally encounters outraged exposés (somebody check my French) of the heavy amount of editing that goes into magazine cover shots and the like. But, with the proofs from my senior portrait today in hand, I decided to indulge myself in a little photoshopping (or in this case GIMPing), just to see if I could make a difference in my own pictures.

The raw material:

This is a scaled-down scan of the pictures the photographers gave us to take home. The pixelation is a remnant of the screening of the original picture, and unfortunately, there was nothing I could do about that.

The surgery:

The letters were removed using the clone stamp tool to duplicate their background. As will be apparent, I gave up after only two letters (though I admit I rather like what is implied by leaving the rest of them on).

Birthmarks and pimples were similarly removed using the clone stamp tool

The skin was smoothed by duplicating the base layer, pixelizing it (averaging every 5×5 block) and applying a Gaussian blur with a radius of 10. This layer was then masked completely and brushed on over large open areas like the forehead (leaving edges intact and crisp).

Finally, both layers were collapsed and I let the GIMP automatically adjust white balance.

The result:

And lastly, a side-by-side comparison:

Lessons learned

1. This is really easy. The photographers have no right to charge so much for blemish removal.
2. By choosing not to mask the blurred layer but setting it at ~40% opacity, I achieve the sort of glowy effect that appears to be favored by Chinese pornographers (judging by the pictures in the Chinatown shop windows). In actual fact, doing this makes me look rather like that photo of Ting Hsu in the yearbook.
3. I’m beautiful just the way I am, but I’m sexy with only minor retouching (though we knew that already, didn’t we?)

Moral ambiguities aside, a thoroughly edifying project.

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The Secret Life of y=x²

misc

I just discovered this languishing on my flash drive and thought I’d put it up….

Anyone who’s taken grade-school math is, of course, familiar with the graph y=x² in the real plane.

We quickly move to discussing functions with complex roots, but little effort is put into trying to visualize those roots – thinking in four dimensions is hard, as is visualizing a graph with a 2-dimensional range.

But, being bored in algebra a couple years ago, I decided to graph y=x² on the complex plane and see what would happen. Here’s what it looks like:

The blue surface shows the real part of the solution and the red surface shows the imaginary part.

If that’s still hard to figure out, a video of the above image being rotated to give a better sense of depth.

Nothing terribly new or exciting, but pretty cool for us public school kids without Mathematica licenses.

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More college madness

misc, personal

It’s been a while since I last posted; I might as well get back into it.

The parental obsession over college applications has reached a new level. Having successfully determined that college counselors are of no use to me (the $70 we spent on that session should have instead gone to provide hot meals for starving African children), we are hiring another, even more expensive college counselor for a session or two. There is no talking them out of it.

This counselor is not going to help me pick schools, because I’ve already done that. This counselor is not going to help me prepare my application becuase 1. I am not hopelessly disorganized. 2. I can write perfectly well, thank you very much, and 3. applications aren’t even available yet.

So why, having determined that the functionality provided by a counselor is useless, do we turn around and hire another one? Suffice it to say that the new counselor works for a school with a better track record for applications to prestigious institutions with leafy walls. Neither of my parents will admit it, but we are talking to this person with the hope that he will pass my name along to his friends on the admissions committees of said prestigious institutions – nothing more.

What this amounts to, in other words, is a bribe. I feel sick.

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