The Notebook is a curation of curiosities and notes on life, design, creativity and space invaders. Recently I've undertaken the 52 Weeks of Progress project, which can be followed here or through my Twitter. Found anything interesting? Get in touch at shane@mahen.net

Hey, it's another photo #2

Some Day

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This is the second photo which I've been experimenting with. I did some stuff with the RGB curves - you can do this by going to layers > curves on Photoshop. It basically allows you to change the appearance of photo by changing the amount of red, blue and green. By some mad magic, it produces some good effects - although I am yet to find out how...


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The Goods #0001

Some Day

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I was pretty stoked when I was asked by several people for my banners in their respective wallpaper forms - if you would like to know, the most popular was the cat (banner on the work page). Anyways, I am not one to oppress the wants of the people, so I do bring the goods.



The Cliff


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Swiss Mountain Village


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The Cat


I left this one till last just to play with you guys, the most popular wallpaper of the week is :the cat

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Tutorial: Enhancing Photos with Gradient Mapping

Some Day

Tutorial


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Check out the large version here.

We’ve all been there, well – the more photographic ones. You have a great photo, images, graphic – but it just isn’t dynamic enough. You might want to enhance the subject, or change the background. I was in that very same scenario, loving this photo I took on holiday, but it just needed some magic. So I had a go at my own enhancing and it came out decently.

The tools you’ll need for this tutorial are Photoshop, a nice photo and 5 minutes. For the purposes of this tutorial, it would be best if you used the image I did, which can be found here. Firstly open up the image in Photoshop.


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Bookel

Some Day

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Coming to a web space near you

Bookel is a site which my friend and I came up with a week ago, and we are trying to get it up and running. Much of coding and essential ideas are there, but we are still figuring out a stylish look for the site.
For those eager to know why I am wasting my time on a project, I don’t thinks it’s wasting but..., Bookel is a place for writers to publish their work online. We are aiming to set up a friendly social community so that users can gain support from other writers through comments, articles and suggestions as well as boost their own credentials as a writer. So we leave you with that, and a song...


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But the best act was...

Some Day

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My brother's. My brother, Beesh, had wanted to perform an MJ dance for a long time and this was a great opportunity. With a little push from Dad, he began practising for his dance. A bit of help from me, and he was ready for the big performance.
To make his performance even more spectacular, it was not included as one of the acts on the night's schedule - intending to be a surprise, which from the reactions, I could gather it was.
As the curtains openned and the beat set in, Beesh began to perform to the tune of Billie Jean. Everyone was clapping along with the beat as he did a killer performance. An elegant throwing of his hat into the crowd ended the spectacle which was received by one new loving fan. The applause was brilliant - definetly the loudest and longest of the event, making him champion of the night.


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The Band's Performance at MTSSC

Some Day

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Hey guys. On saturday my friends and I played a couple of songs at my cricket club's colts evening. They usually get a few people to perform during the event, so I put the band forward to play. After days of practice and upon deciding which songs we would perform we were ready.
So as we went on stage we discovered the problem of playing gigs - setting up. It took us about 20 minutes to connect all the wires, mainly due to the connections with the DJ machine. Finally when the curtains were drawn and we were let loose on stage, we began what would be our first ever gig. We performed "The Scientist" by Coldplay and "Maybe Tomorrow" by Stereophonics. Both songs were pretty good for a first performance, not to say they were perfect.
The main problem we had was to connect to the DJ machine, being behind the speakers we could not experience the actual volume, which turned out to be massively too loud. Volume control for the songs in general was a problem and the microphones were not brilliant - but for our first time it was a damn good effort.


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