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Popular Content

Showing content with the highest reputation on 12/09/2015 in all areas

  1. Hey everybody! So, you may have noticed that there's been a lot of spam around here recently. Sorry about that. Looks like some Korean spammer has identified us as a good dumping ground for their Google-gaming. (If you're one of those spammers, Hi! Get out.) The mod staff has tried several things to stem the tide, which I won't go into here, but we do want to be sensitive to legitimate users joining for legitimate reasons. In the meantime, we're just playing whack-a-mole with the spammers. Please bear with us; we have moderators covering most of the globe, so if there's spam there's probably a moderator available soon to take it down. We're doing our best, but we're humans and they're robots, so it's going to be a difficult battle. If there are any updates that we feel the community should know, we'll make them in this thread. (And seriously, spammers? Out. Now.) Lots of spam? Can't find your post? If your question is buried under tons of spam, we're sorry. Rest assured, there will be a mod around soon to get rid of it. In the meantime, you can find your post by clicking your username in the top-right corner of the site, then hitting "Your Content." All of your posts should be there. Thanks for bearing with us! - - - Incidentally, as of December 8, our mod staff had zapped over 10,000 posts from hundreds of spam accounts.
    6 points
  2. My idea for this was partially inspired by a piece from Red Ochre's gallery, here. I have had, in some of my writing, long had a talisman described as an enormous emerald in a gold wire cage with a chain of the Chinese characters for Truth and Enlightenment. So, I started out. First, I created my emerald, using the tutorial by Ash, here. Then I created a single horizontal gold wire loop using the techniques shown in BarbieQ's tutorial, steps 5-12, here. I then duplicated the final layer of wire loop seven times for a total of eight loops. I made a New Layer and placed it above all the others with numbering to help me keep what was where straight. The first layer was left as it was. For the remainder, I used Layers => Rotate/Zoom to change their orientation. I was working only with what I assume was the X-axis, the first variable on the UI. Layers 2 and 3 were rotated at 22.5 and -22.5 degrees. Layers 4 and 6 were rotated at 45 and -45 degrees. Layer 5 was rotated at 90 degrees. Layers 7 and 8 were rotated at 67.5 and -67.5 degrees. I saved the file. It looked about like this: Then I duplicated each of the wire layers twice, naming then, respectively 1a and 1b, 2a and 2b, 3a and 3b, 4a and 4b, etc. I moved the original layers 1-8 down below the emerald and its green and white radial gradient background. I saved again. (Actually, I saved more frequently than this, but this would be the minimum.) I then selected the emerald layer, and, using the magic wand, clicked outside the emerald to select everything but it. Then I used Ctrl + I to invert the selection so only the emerald was selected. Then I started on the duplicated layers. On 1a, I erased the lower side of the wire, only over the emerald. On 1b, I erased the upper side of the wire over the emerald. And repeat, on 2a and 2b, 3a and 3b, and so forth. Did a save after deselecting the emerald by clicking on its layer and hitting Ctrl + D. Then came the fun. Deciding which layer to have active, and what order the layers should fall in to get the best effect. Discovered I could modify which rings appeared to go over or under each other by the sequence of the layers. My best appearing sequence to date was achieved with these layers active, and in this order: which yielded this: So now I'm trying to figure out how to make this better. I'd really prefer a whole wrap rather than the partial wrap, but whenever I try that, I end up with it looking like a 2D image sitting in front of the gem, ala my first image. I also have to figure out how to make my chain. I have my Chinese characters on small ovals, thus: which should be linked somehow with small wire loops. But I'm not sure how. Any thoughts would be appreciated.
    2 points
  3. In Australia, it is very hot at this time of the year. Not much on TV so my other crafts get a break Seerose I know you will like this one In our backyard we have a pond with fish that I sometimes sell when there are too many. I planted a waterlily because I love them so much. I tried to look after it but the cyclone damaged a lot of my plants & the dogs got into the pond. I thought that all the fish & water plants were dead. I was wrong & then on Saturday I noticed a lily! I was so excited & I took photos of them in the pond. It was hard to get a good macro so I cut one & brought it inside to snap. The result is below. The background is Chad's concrete tute with an overlay of gold gradient (did it a long time ago & just keep it as stock but I will post it up for people to use if wanted). Used Colour Tint to get it to the silvery colour. Plus a bit of my other background (Dream wallpaper, plus Calla Lily bottom part) with layer blend modes/adjusted opacity & Colour Tint. The heart I did for a SOTW I think from a reference image & I used Colour Tint to change it from red to pink. The lilies are my own photos which I cleaned to have a clear background. With a Drop Shadow.
    1 point
  4. BoltBait and I spent a great deal of time online yesterday dealing with the spam. I'd like to thank him and the other Admins & Mods for standing shoulder-to-shoulder in the trenches. Rest assured the battle is being fought on a number of fronts. The autofilter is being used to remove most of the offending material that does make it through. Yesterday alone I posted three new sets of registration questions to try and stem the tide. We have other systems and processes employed, and are investigating more. We seem to have won a small respite. Bear with us.
    1 point
  5. No. That just causes more work for us as we then have to deal with the report. Believe me, we see it. The only time you should report a spam post is if they put the spam at the end of another thread.
    1 point
  6. Thank you moderators and admins! Is it worth us reporting when a new attack starts (though they seem almost constant)?
    1 point
  7. I can agree with that statement, ReMake!
    1 point
  8. I think this is the unending gallery of colors!
    1 point
  9. Original Size: 1600x900 Wallpaper Link: http://fs5.directupload.net/images/151208/aszx7kcx.png Original Size: 1600x900 Wallpaper Link:http://fs5.directupload.net/images/151208/7dhhhbdy.png Original Size: 1600x900 Wallpaper Link:http://fs5.directupload.net/images/151208/eq52v2zf.png
    1 point
  10. Edit, 22-01-2010: Segment Image 1.1, a small update. It's now much easier to cancel the effect before it finishes running! See bottom of post for download. Hi everyone, Hot on the heels of #2, here's my third plugin, "Segment Image". I wasn't actually going to release this - it was originally a Code Lab experiment that I threw together a few days ago. But it's proven surprisingly useful, so I thought I'd port it to Visual Studio, clean it up, and post it here. This effect performs what some might call "automatic image segmentation by clustering". It analyzes the pixels of the image and arranges them into several groups, trying to ensure that each group's pixels are relatively close together in the image and have roughly the same color. So the effect helps you to break up an image into its constituent regions. It also helps you to find a small color palette that matches an image. The UI allows you to specify the number of groups that you'd like the effect to look for, the relative influence of the color variables and the location variables, and the type of output that you'd like to see. If you leave the checkbox unchecked, the effect will fill each pixel in a group with a representative color for that group. If you check it, the representative colors of all the groups will be displayed as a set of horizontal bars over the selection. Image segmentation Start out with a guess as to the number of clusters in the image. If adjacent parts of your image that should be distinct seem to be stuck together in one cluster, move the bias slider to the left by a small amount. If adjacent parts of your image that should be one continuous cluster are split into several clusters, move the bias slider right by a small amount. This is the preferred way to fix any issues with the clustering, but if there really do seem to be too few or too many different clusters, adjust "Number of clusters" up or down by 1 as appropriate. Repeat this until the result looks good. Then check the "Higher quality" box. Around 10 clusters, bias somewhere near 0.5, "Higher quality". Some clusters were merged by selecting them with Magic Wand (global fill mode, tolerance 0%) and then running Average Color (HSL). Original Image Palette extraction Check the "Display palette instead of segmentation" box. Move the slider all the way to the left. If the palette doesn't seem to contain enough colors, increase "number of colors" by 1. If the colors in the palette are a little too distinct, you can also move the slider a little ways towards the right. Repeat this until the result looks good. I saw while writing this post that jxp has released a plugin that saves the colors in the image as a palette file, so you might want to use that as well! 32 clusters, bias 0.01, "Display palette...", "Higher quality". Original Image General Be careful with the sliders when you run this on large images. If you push the bias too far to the left or right, or increase the number of clusters too much, it could result in the effect running for a very long time. This was the only major issue that I encountered in my testing, so I incorporated two safeguards that should prevent the clustering algorithm from running on forever. They can be relaxed somewhat by checking the "high quality" box. If you tell it to find 32 clusters in a large image, you'll be waiting for a very long time. I tested a 39 megapixel image with two clusters, and somehow, it did actually manage to return a result. It took 2.8 GB of memory to do it, and it sucked up an entire CPU core for about five minutes. You've been warned! Please remember to save your images. Use this effect at your own risk. As usual, thanks to Rick Brewster, Tom Jackson, and Boltbait. Without Paint.NET and Code Lab, none of my plugins would exist. To install, simply unzip to your Effects folder. I'd be glad to clean the source up for release, if anyone would like to see it. Feel free to use Reflector to reverse/adapt it until then. License (MIT) is included in the archive. Enjoy! You can find Segment Image in the Effects > Color menu. Version 1.0 was downloaded 414 times. SegmentImage.zip
    1 point
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