I don’t have time to be funny today but if you want to laugh and cry, listen to this Turkish (although sung in English) cover of The Beatles classic Yesterday. Please listen to the whole song, it gets better and better (worse and worse). It’s so bad it’s good.

Later,
Buikhu

Photo credit: Not published as per submitter’s request

P.S. If you have submitted a photo but haven’t seen it here yet, be patient and have a bowl of Honey Nut Cheerios.

P.P.S. Oh, I almost completely forgot Detail Comparison.

I’ve always had a thing about grainy pictures. You don’t want to know why. No one I know seems to share this thing and therefore I’ve had to drill “grain is bad, noise is evil” into my head.

This brings us to today’s Photoshop task. A nice lady from Spain sent me a photo taken with a camera phone (two-megapixel Nokia 8600 Luna, if you care). Noise, grain and snow were all present. Yum!

After drooling over the photo for a moment, I knew what I had to do.
Fast forward a few hours and here’s the result:

My fixation wasn’t the only reason I decided to leave some of the graininess intact. Dramatic noise reduction often has the undesired side effect of making photos look like photorealistic drawings. That’s why you should never attempt to remove noise, but reduce it.

Use Detail Comparison for a more particular examination.

I also created a crazed-four-retro-pop-art-panel thingy while brainstorming.

Drink Pepsi,
Buikhu

Photo credit: Rhéa Nielsen <- She’s so pretty I shouldn’t have called her a lady.

P.S. Video noise is always, always unforgivable.

Demon Themes wanted some help with a picture of his (or her, maybe she’s a lesbian) girlfriend. That’s exactly what I’m here for.

Before Photoshop, she looked like this:

After I was done playing with her, she looked like this:

I’m introducing a new feature called Detail Comparison so you can better compare the two versions. Check it out, it’s neat.

Thanks, Demon, for lending me your girlfriend.

Later,
Buikhu

Photo credit: Demon Themes

P.S. I couldn’t enable Lightbox for Detail Comparison because it doesn’t support flash. I’m working on a workaround, though.

Today’s photo is way overdue. I’m not satisfied with the result but as I have very little time to spend on each project, it’s time to move on.

The original picture:

Current version:

I wasn’t exactly asked to make it look like a painting but I wanted to blur the line between reality and fantasy because I thought “Allie in Wonderland” would be a good title. No, I wasn’t high, I’m not into flying.

I want to apologize to the person who sent this photo. What happened to Alice in the story, happened to me. We realized Wonderland was not so wonderful after all.

I’m going to have to revisit this one in the future.

Will post again soon,
Buikhu

Photo credit: Ruthie

“Can you survive for 24 hours without your computer? The idea behind Shutdown Day is to find out how many people can go without a computer for one whole day, and what will happen if we all participate.”
http://www.shutdownday.org/

Whoever wrote that must think our computers are physically becoming a part of us. That’s an interesting theory and inspired me to design a Shutdown Day poster.

This is what I started with:

I decided to replace the belly button with a belly power button, remove the tattoo and colorize the image.
Here’s the result:

I have one question, though. How would you turn yourself on?

Anyway, I’m so participating! I promise I’ll shutdown my computer on 03 May 2008. You should, too.

Adiós,
Buikhu

Photo credit: Cherie Wren

Submit something.

I’m by no means anti-freckles but when it comes to photography, they can be tricky. The thing is, sometimes they look extremely good, sometimes not so much. A quick Photoshop freckle removal can save the day when you wish the model’s face was as smooth as a baby’s bottom.

Some other tweaking was involved as well, but the freckle removal made the biggest difference for sure.

That’s it for now. I think the picture speaks for itself so I won’t go on and on about the obvious. Remember to submit your photo for retouching.

Have fun,
Buikhu

Photo credit: Matthew Bowden

The moment I saw this picture I knew it had untapped potential. Initially, I went a bit crazy with the editing and ended up with a picture so flawless I swear I could smell plastic. Gone was the chemistry between the girls. Gone was the emotion. Damn it, I thought.

A mongoose can defeat a cobra so all hope wasn’t gone. It was just back to the drawing board. “This photo is about friendship so we don’t want to see two mannequins”, I said out loud. I was alone so I felt like a crazy person. Anyway, what we want to see is some skin. Umm, skin texture, I mean. That did the trick for the most part but I also had to get rid of the flimsy-looking necklace, fix their deformed faces and emphasize their eyes, among other things. There was one dilemma, though. I had to debate with myself over hair extensions. I won. No extensions were needed.

By the way, is it just me or does the girl on the left have some Teri Hatcher going on?

Have a nice day,
Buikhu

Photo credit: Scott Snyder

P.S. Due to server updates, my blog has been down for the past few days but everything should be back to normal again.

Now, submit a photo.