Graphics Programs Reference
In-Depth Information
years ago, mind you), band names made sense. There were The Beatles, and The Turtles,
and The Animals, and The Monkees, and The Flesh Eating Mutant Zombies, and The
Carnivorous Flesh Eating Vegetarians, and The Bulimic Fresh Salad Bar Restockers, and
names that really made sense. But, “The Bags?” Unless this is a group whose members are
made up of elderly women from Yonkers, I think it's totally misnamed. You see, when I
was a kid, when a band was named The Turtles, its members looked and acted like turtles.
That's what made it great (remember their hit single “Peeking Out of My Shell,” or who
could forget “Slowly Crossing a Busy Highway” or my favorite “I Got Hit Crossing a Busy
Highway”?). But today, you don't have to look ugly to be in a band named Ugly Casanova,
and I think that's just wrong. It's a classic bait-and-switch. If I were in a band (and I am),
I would name it something that reflects the real makeup of the group, and how we act. An
ideal name for our band would be The Devastatingly Handsome Super Hunky Guys With
Six-Pack Abs (though our fans would probably just call us TDHSHGWSPA for short). I
could picture us playing at large 24-hour health clubs and Gold's Gyms, and other places
where beautiful people (like ourselves) gather to high-five one another on being beautiful.
Then, as we grew in popularity, we'd have to hire a manager. Before long he would sit us
down and tell us that we're living a lie, and that TDHSHGWSPA is not really the right
name for our band, and he'd propose something along the lines of Muscle Bound Studs
Who Are Loose With Money or more likely, The Bags.
Sharpening Essentials
After you've tweaked your photo the way you want it, and right before you save it, you'll
definitely want to sharpen it. I sharpen every photo, either to help bring back some of the
original crispness that gets lost during the correction process, or to help fix a photo that's
slightly out of focus. Either way, I haven't met a digital camera (or scanned) photo that I
didn't think needed a little sharpening. Here's a basic technique for sharpening the entire
photo:
Step One:
Open the photo you want to sharpen. Because Photoshop displays your photo differently at
different magnifications, choosing the right magnification (also called the zoom amount)
for sharpening is critical. Because today's digital cameras produce such large-sized files,
it's now pretty much generally accepted that the proper magnification to view your photos
during sharpening is 50%. If you look up in your image window's title bar, it displays the
current percentage of zoom (shown circled here in red). The quickest way to get to a 50%
magnification is to press
Command-+
(plus sign;
PC: Ctrl-+
) or
Command--
(minus
sign;
PC: Ctrl--
) to zoom the magnification in or out.
