chess

flashCHESS III in Google Chrome OS

A truly humbling moment: Google has selected my flashCHESS III flash chess game to be included with their Chrome OS.

photography
photography

A photographer’s secret weapon – Portrait Professional 9

Portrait retouching. Everybody does it. In many cases is common knowledge, in fact it’s expected – “of course it’s photoshopped”. From the now famous Dove commercial to the ridiculous Ralph Lauren ad, portrait retouching is a very sensitive area yet part of everyday life. In this post, I’ll review a program that makes retouching a child’s play.

code
php

VirtueMart quick tip: show brand/manufacturer logo in product details

VirtueMart supports Manufacturer details but by default it just shows the manufacturer’s name in brackets, with a javascript pop-up window, that looks pretty ugly. Fortunately we can add the logo by using the description field of the Manufacturers details and by hacking one file.

database3
mysql

Using MySQL to generate daily sales reports with filled gaps

I was surprised to see that there’s not a great deal of info on the web on how to do a proper daily report – one that doesn’t have any gaps when data is missing. In this post I’ll try to quide you through building such a report using MySQL and PHP for a nice chart.

photoshop

Advanced Day-to-Night Photoshop Tutorial

In this tutorial I will teach you how to edit in photo in Lightroom and Photoshop to dramatically alter its appearance and mood. We’ll change a broad daylight scene into a night-time one, lit by a street lamp. I’ll also take the opportunity to describe some non-destructive editing techniques in Photoshop.

photoshop

HDR How-to: Photoshop vs. Picturenaut

As I’ve discussed before, a regular photo can’t capture the full range of lights and shadows that the human eye can see. Photographers have long learned to avoid high-contrast situations or to use them to create artistic effects. It all changed when Paul Devebec presented at SIGGRAPH 1997 a method for combining several images with different exposures into one single image with a much higher range of luminosity.

laptop
photoshop

Best 50 Photoshop CS4 shortcuts

Finding tools or remembering where is a button you need fast can be disturbing sometimes so I have selected 50 useful keyboard shortcuts to help you work faster.

javascript

Javascript animated collapsible panels without any frameworks

If you need to make collapsible panels that remember their state, but don’t want to use any javascript framework, this tutorial will help you do this with no headaches – and you’ll learn some neat javascript tricks too!

photography

Photography: RAW matters

If you own a semi-pro or pro digital camera and you’ve seen file quality settings such as “Extra fine”, “Fine”, “Standard”, “RAW” but never know what “RAW” stands for; if you heard about RAW on forums but never quite understood it; if you ever looked in awe at photos wondering how you could achieve such great colors, then look no further, as I am going to explain all there is to know about RAW.

php

Does your PHP/MySQL app speak Unicode?

I find it very annoying when I come across web apps that still can’t handle non-ASCII characters correctly. In this article, I’ll show you how, with just a few lines of code, you can “globalize” your online app.

photography

Photography – understanding exposure

To aid those who want to be in control of their cameras, to go beyond point-and-shoot, I decided to write a series of tutorials on the basics of photography. If you don’t know what the exposure or aperture are, this little tutorial is for you, so read on.