I was never planning on posting this, but Geoff's post about the Belfast Ale festival (somewhere I've yet to manage to get to) put me in mind of a picture I took last week while out and about.

A few weeks back, I decided to start carrying my camera as much as possible. My rationale simply being I'm trying to learn how to take a picture and a lot of that is the ability to spot one. If I have the camera, I have no excuse but to play with it...

Anyway, last Monday I got coerced into a 'single' pint after work and before my train. Well.... several pints and missed trains later... I give you

Beer, Nectar of the Gods.

 (0.6 secs, f/1.8, focal length - 50mm, ISO - 100, 26/11/07 18:36)

Before you ask, yes I may have tweaked it a little. Essentially I reduced the colour thresholds to intensify the colour of the beer before using that selective colourisation trick to mask it through onto a black and white foreground.

The edging of the beer isn't great, it really was just me messing for five minutes. But, as I said, Geoff's beer post made me decide it was enough of a brew to put up.

Oh, and in case you're interested, mines a pint of Stella...

What?! Oh come on, you mean to tell me that you didn't see me sneaking that line in somewhere the first chance I got?

You people give me way too much credit.

At the end of my dice snapping frenzy I got to playing with the pictures in Gimp, particularly this one:



I'd intended to make the picture black and white to see if it looked pretty, but ended up playing with the 'Colour Levels' widget.  Now I'm sure there is a technical explanation for what the widget does, but to my eyes it makes dark areas darker, bright areas brighter and the bit in the middle brighter or darker as required. Hold on, a random website says this:

 'The Level tool provides features similar to the Histogram tool but can also change the intensity range of the active layer or selection'

I ended up with this:



Now I like this. I think the background feels richer the colours a little more intense.

It's still not black and white though.

So, out of desperation (where is the magic make my button black and white), I used Google and I ended up finding a tutorial to help me do this:



Now I really like this.

OK, the edging around the dice (OK die you pedant. No, not as in cease to live more as in singular of dice)  isn't as neat as it could b, but I was up against it time wise and this was less than 10 minutes work all in.

I could pretend like I spent hours working all this out in Gimp, or reproduce the tutorial and claim kudos for something I didn't do, but I'm not into that (and I might get caught), so here it is....

Selective Colorization

So, whatcha think?