The San Francisco Citizen

First of all, wait for all the stuff to clear out. Like what? How about Darth Vader-ish sculptures or a Victory Garden with an extended lease?

Then, you just have to straighten out the flagpoles on both sides so that they’re parallel, if you want. This photo here at sfgov.org shows a little distortion if you look for it.  

Here’s an attempt to portray parallel lines as parallel, the way they actually are in real life (more or less). This is the analog approach, which isn’t perfect.

Click to expand:

Or, you can do it in Photoshop with or without a plug-in like PTLens. You can do a more perfect job, but sometimes you end up with an artificial look.

Or, backing away from the building helps a bit, as shown here.

Or, you can just not worry about it.

No biggee.

Apple retail stores are offering four free workshops that are recommended for kids ages 8 to 12 this summer. Sign them up today! But hurry, as spaces are filling up right now.

Is this how they will greet your tweens when they arrive at the three-hour workshops in July? We can only hope.

Talk with your young ‘uns and pick two of the following:

Apple is the new Borg - the sooner your kids realize that, the better. Give in.

See you there!

Some people take advice from Ken Rockwell and turn up the colors on their digital cameras up to eleven or to +3 or whatever. Like vivid, man. What’s wrong with that? Nothing, as long that’s what you want to do.

But take a look at this quick example showing what turning up the colors does. The photo below shows the same subject, the Nikon D300, as photographed by Ken Rockwell and DPReview. Notice any difference between the photos?

Ken Rockwell’s shot shows a pure red rubber finger grip instead of the more salmon type color that’s accurately shown on the right. How can you tell? Well, using an eyedropper tool or something similar in Photoshop or something similar allows you to see the color makeup of different parts of an image.

So the RGB digital 8-bit per channel code for Rockwell’s shot is 255, 0, 0, meaning all red, no green and no blue. Or is you prefer the subtractive color model, 100% magenta and yellow with 0% cyan and 0% black.

Why is that bad? Because everything that’s kind of red goes to pure red and you end up with more of a photo illustration, rather than a photo. If that’s the way you want to go, that’s fine. But there’s not a lot of things in the real world that are fully saturated 100% pure red (outside of a ruby laser, that is).

So what do you think of these “great colors“? Read on if you care:

Overdose of LSD

Fisher-Prices colours fanboy

Overkill on the saturation

Of course, do it the way you want. But all color all the time might tire you. Just saying.

Over at the New York Times, there’s talk that this photo could be the oldest in the world, perhaps from the 1790’s. They’re still looking into it.

Here it is:

Not too appealing, huh? That’s no way to maximise value at auction. Old photographs can be worth big bucks (NSFW) these days, of course.

But a little Photoshopping using tips from worldwide auction leader eBay gives us:

Now that’s a leaf, much better. This will guarantee top dollar at auction no matter how old it is. Let the bidding begin.