Influence the Colour Range in 8-bit Graphics

Update! This article was written for Photoshop CS3. It would appear CS5 does not offer the same functionality.

This is a neat little technique I stumbled upon one day while poking around in Photoshop’s “Save for Web…” settings. It allows weighting of Photoshop’s colour palette when saving 8-bit images. As with a lot of discoveries in life, it wasn’t long before I found it coming in very handy.

Saving this graphic for web as an 8-bit image was creating a lot of undesirable banding in the gradients of the coloured twirls. (Saving as a 24-bit image was out of the question given the file size. Saving as .jpg could be a consideration, but as we shall see, not necessary.)

The PNG and GIF compression algorithms determine their palettes based on frequency of each colour. So in this case the blacks and greys are over represented, while the pinks and blues (and to some extent yellows) are under represented. That’s why the banding is most obvious in the colourful sections of the graphic.
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San Francisco Zoo Table Lamp

Designed by Darshita Mistry | Country: USA
Sustainable Table Lamp Design for San Francisco Zoo.

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Stun Them All with Tiger Eye Beads

Tiger eye beads are from the quartz group. They have a lot of luster that is glossy. This also shows a display of what looks like changing colors. This happens when the light passes through it. This is because it has many fibrous bands. These are very durable and can be worn by anyone. Whoever is wearing these is believed to be very courageous and have a lot of confidence in themselves in many cultures.

Tiger eye beads make great pendants. These are also good beads to make a necklace with a string of them. The colors of this bead will range from a golden to a red-brown color. All of these will have a contrasting band of colors. From the contrast in colors, when light shines on them, they appear to swap the colors from the different angles. The tiger eye beads have silky luster. This makes them very attractive for any piece of jewelry.
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Photoshop CS6 improvements

ZIIIRO Celeste

Make Your Own Terrarium

Terrariums are the perfect garden for any of you urban city dwellers desperate for a little green.

A terrarium is a collection of small plants growing in a transparent, sealed container. It is a closed environment, and can actually be used to illustrate how an ecosystem works. Inside a terrarium’s walls, many different natural processes may be observed: such as photosynthesis, respiration, and the water cycle. The water in the terrarium is constantly recycled. As the moisture in the air condenses on the glass walls, it returns to the soil and is absorbed by the plants’ roots.
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Baxter Finley Barber

Baxter of California is the ultimate male grooming brand, intended for men.
Baxter of Calfornia‘s slogan could well be “The ultimate playboy’s line”. The brand was created in Beverly Hills in 1965 by Baxter Finley, a big name on the New York advertising scene who had difficulty adapting to the California sunshine.  In his quest for the ultimate men’s moisturizer (one which wouldn’t smell like the endless flowery alternatives already on the market), the ad mogul ended up a business man in his own right, creating his own label and with it the first ever “men only” cosmetics line.

The Little People Project

Abandoning little people on the streets since 2006 by Slinkachu.

Slinkachu modifies and paints figurines made for model train sets before installing them in streets and parks, where he photographs the scene and leaves the characters behind. His street installations are constructed in all sorts of public spaces, the portrayal of little lives that mirror our own. Working in miniature opens up the city landscapes in unexpected ways and this is explored in Ground Zero where he literally brings you down to a new level.
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Coffee Stain Portrait

Designed by Hong Yi (Oh I see Red).

This project was inspired by the opening and closing lines in Jay Chou’s song, Secret. The opening line is about lifting a coffee cup off the saucer. The ending line of the song is about autumn leaves and fragmented pieces. Hundreds of individual coffee stain rings, many of them broken and imperfect like fallen autumn leaves, form a whole portrait. The singer tells a heartbreak tale of a lost romance with a girl from 1979 who time-traveled forward 20 years and met Jay in 1999, and they fell in love. She then went back to 1979 and sketched a portrait of him. “My painting is meant to look like a sepia-toned old photograph to capture the essence of this story. The project took about 12 hours to finish. Coffee is quite a challenging medium to use – too little water and the rings wouldn’t form easily, too much water and the rings would blend into each other, resulting in just a deformed pool of coffee. I had to also wait for the lighter parts too dry up before stamping on the darker rings, or else the rings would not be visible.”
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MiniLook Kiev

Stop-motion video capturing a Spring day in the city of Kiev.

Source by nationaltraveller