Last Instinct

I got a bit inspired by my previous Sparkling sunset made with Photoshop and wanted to make a proof of concept for Adobe Flash. So I animated the sunset. This is what you can do with Flash without using much code. I have just used a few lines to randomize starting points. All other graphic effects are built into Flash and needs no coding.

Wouldn’t it be cool if sunsets like these existed?

I found some amazing colorful wallpapers in a theme pack for Windows 7 called Surreal Territory by Chuck Anderson of NoPattern. He has really done a lot of great colorful designs! I got a bit inspired to make something similar. So I took one of my photos from Skanör last weekend and made a truly colorful sparkling sunset! Feel free to download it as a wallpaper or something. =)

Try the live demo of the Channel Colorizer Pixel Bender filter I made a couple of weeks ago. You can load an image or use your webcam and then change the RGB colors to some cool theme using coloring by Adobe Kuler. And naturally, you can save your images back to your disk to use them for anything you like.

Adobe Kuler gives the coloring an extra dimension. You can search for whatever comes to your mind: bananas, fire, happiness, an author or a specific color. Just keep in mind that you have to be a little bit patient with the search times, since the kuler-servers seems to be a bit overloaded.

The demo features a couple of really cool techniques:

• The Pixel Bender filter running live with webcam support.
• Coloring themes using Adobe Kuler via the ColorMunch AS3 class by Ben Kanizay
• Asynchronous saving of JPEG-files in Flash based on libjpeg using the Alchemy JPEG-encoder AS3 class by Mateusz Małczak

Go ahead and make some cool images and feel free to post some comments about it!

ChannelColorizer by Klas Lundberg is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.5 Sweden.
Feel free to contact me if you want it for commercial use.

I went for a walk in the nice weather at Västra Hamnen in Malmö today. The air temperature was about 2°C and a bit sunny. Then I suddenly saw a couple of guys getting ready to bath in the cold water (apparently about 0°C). Unbelievable! So I took a couple of pictures and one of them got into the local newspaper. =) You can read about it at Sydsvenskan (in swedish).

The golden section is perceived and used by most humans, whether they know it or not. By thinking about it and use it in you photos or other graphics, you can get a great composition easily.

The golden ratio works like this mathematically:

If you have a small section and a large section, the relation between the two is the same as the relation between the large section and total section (the sum of the two sections together). After doing some math we find that if the smaller section is 1, the bigger section is ~1.62. This means that the golden section is positioned at ~62% of the two together.

You should not get obsessed with this number when it comes to design and you should not use it with too much exactness. It’s really just a good hint about what humans generally like in composition. Since we naturally like it — it’s easy to use. You don’t have to measure or use a template for it, you just have to know about it. Since we like it, we easily guess where the position of the golden section is.

To use it in a composition, just take out the main element in the image and position it in the golden section. The hard part could be to identify what element in the photo that is the main element or the most significant line. You have to identify what the eye looks at first or what you want it to look at. Try to identify lines in the image or objects that differ from the rest. Here are a few examples:

• If you have a whole person in an big environment, you naturally look at the person.
• If you just have a person, the main element is the eyes of the person.
• If you have a landscape, the horizon is often the most significant line.

The example to the left is unmodified and the photo to the right was cropped.