Bimonthiversary
February 21st, 2007 @ 0:31 by NormMonkey
My favourite blue devil and I this weekend celebrated Valentine’s Day as well as our 2nd month of happiness together. Among our weekend of fun was a trip to Santé restaurant, for which we decided to get all dressed up and stuff:
Fancy!
(take a good look, this doesn’t happen often!)
Of the handful of shots I took, half were out of focus - weird interaction with the remote, perhaps? Naturally the ones that *were* OK were the ones where we’re smooching. Also the flash did not fire (my flash’s batteries are getting low, taking time to charge up between shots) so I had to hork the whitebalance in postprocessing again. I’m getting better at it, I think.
In other restaurant news, we tried out Sushi Kanata which is a nice place to go for sushi - if you don’t mind waiting 5 years for the staff. I guess they take their ‘waiter’ positions seriously.
Tomorrow is BARENAKED LADIES!!!ONE!ELEVEN!!, the final event in our series of celebrations.
VECTORS
At work today I started working on some graphics design which lead to learning some new tools for converting bitmaps to vectors and for manipulating vectors. Here’s a quick example, using one of the roses I drew for my little Valentine’s card (see previous post). The roses were hand-drawn, then I photographed them with my digital camera and worked them in The Gimp to get the roses you see in the card.
Today I took one of the roses, down-sampled it a bit, then tried both autotrace and potrace to find the best conversion I could (turns out that potrace does superior conversions for black and white images). Finally I used inkscape to make a few artifacts go away (sharpened the thorns, cleaned up the stem, stretched the lines on the two background petals).
Before
After
Here’s a before / after comparison. The “before” is the downsampled version of my hand-drawn rose, though I up-scaled it here to emphasize its bitmapped nature.
I’m looking forward to working with these tools some more. This is a new realm of artistry for me to explore!
