Here I am!!!

A picture post in a long time. Somehow feel all my time is being robbed by people who are unimportant in MY life. And that explains why the blog has been clean and not littered with my writing...;)...Again this is something that I had done sometime back and isnt fresh here...I shall try and come up with something interesting soon...:D...

Clutter

My desk is more often cluttered than not. Right from the stapler I last touched weeks ago to the email I printed ten seconds ago. It's never dirty, someone cleans for me once in a while but definitely cluttered. I organize once every while, but like pig-pen from Peanuts, it's a matter of minutes before the desk reaches it's normal stable state. I have heard somebody say:

"True personal clutter amounts to a chaotic system based on the mental patterns of the clutterer. There is a pattern in the chaos, but the initial state and the chaos function are in the mind of the creator, so while to any outside observer it just looks like a mess, to the creator it makes perfect sense."

While I cannot test or prove the veracity of that statement, I like to believe it as it tends to suggest that the creator is organized, so much so, that he/she can even make sense in chaos :p

My desktop is a sharp contrast to my desk though. I have a minimal set of icons on it and always use a minimalist wallpaper which enough clutter free areas that hold my Icons and they never interfere with each other. I am usually very picky about my wallpapers, and often end up editing what I find on the net to suit my style. Sometimes when I have the time and inclination, I also create my own, here is my current wallpaper that I have created.



If you'd like to get it on your screen too, try these: 1024x768 1280x1024

The Real Photoshop

When I outgrew MS paint eons ago and wanted a tool that was a tad more powerful, I picked up the one that was within the easiest reach. That month's PC World magazine CD carried a trial version of Jasc Paint Shop Pro 3.0 and I started using it. Soon I heard about Photoshop but I was comfortable with PSP and felt no need to change.PSP used to have all the features of Photoshop but was significantly cheaper, and was often called the "poor man's Photoshop". As my skills improved and newer versions came out, I stuck with PSP right upto version 9.0

The the unthinkable happened. Corel acquired Jasc. Corel stopped projecting PSP as a Photoshop competitor and started tagetting non-pro users. The GUI became overly shiny and useless but the feature set started stagnating, bugs started creeping in. I stuck with Jasc's last version instead of moving to Corel's (which I think is now at 12.0)

But then the age of the software started showing, as Adobe came up with CS, CS2 and soon to be out CS3, I was stuck with an ancient piece of software. So I decided to make the jump.

So I got a copy of PS CS2. It is certainly cool. possibly even cooler. But my biggest gripe is that, having been used to a different tool, I struggle for hours even to find the simplest tools or figure out how to make them behave the way I want them to. I spent about 20 minutes figuring out how to select the background color using the ink-dropper tool..

(I think the biggest difference I found so far is that Adobe doesn't like the mouse so much, alternative uses of tools are not right-click but are usually ctrl-click or alt-click. Photoshop does not use the scroll wheel at all! PSP zooms in and out with the wheel and you can vary values using the wheel too. Photoshop leans more towards Keyboard shortcuts. Grr.. I can never remember them)

Well all in all, I've spent about a few hours making this image from scratch and I've had fun. So I must say Adobe, you've won a convert. Without much further ado, I present my first Photoshop creation :)

Enter Sandman

Title Courtesy: Ra.Ge

Meetings

More!

Tug

Here's one more teaser I did for the team-excursion organizers.

PS: I shamelessly stole this and the earlier source images from some flickr users (probably copyrighted). I promise to find them again and link to the originals.

Image Credit: LFM

Want to go out for a coffee?

Some people in my office are working out plans for a group outing. They wanted to send out some mailers, I made this for them.



Image Credit: Giant Ginkgo

Violets in Technicolor

Eerie

Created entirely from scratch in Paintshop Pro. I drew that moon earlier to illustrate a point, though I'd extend it a little and created the silhouettes. I think the image badly needs a bat, an owl or a howling dog :p

(I took the upper parts of the branches from one of my earlier photographs)

Silhouette

Stopped at a random location on ECR to get this. Added a vignette in PaintShopPro, which happens to be the poor man's Photoshop :)

Photoshop - Pencil Sketch Simulation

Well, the picture in itself says it all. Its an attempted pencil sketch of the "Pachaikili Muthucharam" beauty Andrea through one of my favourite pastimes, the Photoshop.

Source pic: Indiaglitz (but edited for this post)
In case you want to know how this was done, please leave a comment and i shall be more than happy to demonstrate.

Go here for Original