#well… it is now

[starqueensthings]

Hi pals!

I’ll still be travelling when you’re seeing this and haven’t watched the finale, so I don’t have any new content to share, but last week (maybe longer? I don’t know— rainforest brain lol) I posted a poll asking if anyone was interested in seeing a snippet of my editing process, so here it is feat. possibly one of my favourite Wrecker moments.

I use a myriad of different software depending on: my mood, what computer/tablet I’m using, what the image looks like, and how much energy I’m willing to put into it lol In this video, I’m using Lightroom on my iPad.

The three main factors I look mostly closely at when I’m editing shots are 1. lighting, 2. noise, and 3. resolution (read: clarity).

This image required pretty minimal work so it’s probably not the best example, but ah well. The process in the above video is as follows, and please note the video had been sped up to 2x for file size reasons lol

The first thing I’ll do is see what the auto edit function defaults to. Often times it overexposes the image, resulting in significant colour noise, but it gives me a decent idea of what I should expect in terms of colour corrections and exposure mapping. The auto edit function wasn’t terrible in this case, but did produce some colour noise, mainly on Wrecker’s chest plate, his sleeves, and the officers hat. Once I’m done the initial scope out, I’ll exposure the image as high as possible to crop it— usually with the subject being as centered as possible.

This software lets the user tweak the bones of the image individually in three ways, all of them very quickly demonstrated here. The first is the curve method which I despise and NEVER use— because it alters multiple aspects at once, I don’t feel like I have the same degree of control as the other methods. Next is HDR setting (the default upon import) using the sliders on the right. This is effective for images that are already pretty well lit, and does give me a little more control, but most of the time because the screenshots are so dark, I’m editing in SDR mode.

Once I’m satisfied with the exposure/lighting, I’ll move on to correcting colour distortion and saturating the image. This software also provides three methods for colour alternation and I’ll typically use all three in conjunction with each other. Colour mixing is extremely crucial when it comes to reducing odour noise and distortion. Because this software lets me isolate certain colours to adjust their hue, saturation, and luminance, I can typically reduce most of or all of the colour noise. However, it does have its limitations. In this particular post, desaturating the colour noise in Crosshair’s rifle coincided with blanching his skin tone, because this software does not let me isolate certain areas of an image. It was also important to me to emphasize the warm tones from the sunset in the background for the overall mood of the shot, so I opted to remove what colour noise I could and leave the rest. (You can’t win em all… especially when the starting image is near-black lol)

Correcting the colour distortion in this image was not particularly difficult, desaturating all purple tones removed the noise from his chest plate, and shifting green tones to something near a yellow instead removed the noise from his sleeve. I didn’t notice the colour noise on the officers hat until a little later, but that was pretty easily corrected too.

Once I’ve fixed the colour noise, I’ll shift to toning the overall image. Wrecker particularly looks good in cool tones, but It’s nice to contrast a cool tone background with the warmth of his skin.

Once the toning is done, I’ll move on the image clarity. I don’t have the means to alter the actual resolution of the image, but I’m particularly picky with balancing texture and clarity. Wrecker always looks the best with texture and clarity increased, because it brings out the scarring on his face and further humanizes him, but overdoing the texture can also emphasize pixelation. Once that’s done, I’ll reduce the overall noise only slightly (doing too much makes them look airbrushed and unnatural), and whatever is left of the colour noise (too much of this setting makes them look like ghouls LOL)

This software also offers a series of preset alterations/filters briefly shown in this video… but I’m not the biggest fan of any of them. I’m a bit of a control freak and would rather tweak each aspect individually to the degree that I like, instead blanketing the image with present modifications and then undoing certain aspects.

Before exporting the image I’ll do another once over and make sure I’m happy! In this case, I opted to go back in and add some darker tones back into the image. I don’t do this often, particularly when they start so damn dark, but I wanted to keep the focus centrally on Wrecker’s radiance lol

That’s about it. If I’m working on multiple edits in a set, this software lets me just copy and paste the settings, so the following images only require extremely light tweaks and take almost no time. And that, I’ll export, autograph, and upload!

Thank you for attending this unprofessional Ted Talk.

[wishfulsketching]

Girl dad Silco is a source of endless entertainment for me

Extra doodles:

Someone save Sevika, she is in hell

[bookwyrminspiration]

sometimes a theme recurs in your work without your permission. and sometimes it reaches a threshold where you're like. well now i think this is saying something about me against my will. don't know what though

[pangur-and-grim]

also I got a tattoo partially re-coloured today and they bandaged me in veterinary wrap like I'm a sick horse

[shinynewmemories]

The Hunger Games has the FUNNIEST arranged marriage of all time btw. Katniss realizes she'll have to marry Peeta and she's obviously upset so Haymitch tries to comfort her by saying "you could do a lot worse" and Katniss is like "well DUH of course I could do worse than Peeta he's the best & handsomest person on the face of the planet but that's not the POINT I want to be able to choose for MYSELF". Then she goes and chooses Peeta anyway lol. Comedy gold I tell you

[napping-sapphic]

take your clothes off and get on the bed what no we aren’t having sex right now we’re cuddling and pressing every inch of skin together as close as possible for the next six hours

[batcavescolony]

Katniss is such an unreliable narrator. She says "Then something unexpected happens. At least, I don't expect it because I don't think of District 12 as a place that cares about me" girl you deliver strawberries to the Mayor, you hunt and trade for the district, when you fell at Prim being chosen someone caught you, when you went to Prim people parted for you, when you volunteered EVERYONE stopped. Idk how to tell you but I think you're a pillar of the community.

[rivetgoth]

It's honestly crazy that discussion around testosterone HRT skews so much towards the beginning stages of it (to the point that you have dozens of guys thinking their transition is "failed" if they don't pass by like a year in lol) and what the initial changes of the first couple of months to years look like, like the classic laundry list of those early basic changes like bottom growth, voice drop, etc, when IMO literally none of that compares remotely to the depth and intensity of the long term total masculinization you start to experience like 3-5+ years in.

[inkskinned]

my brother got covid because he's a college professor and there's not much he can do to mitigate exposure when he has 200+ students per lecture. he's got a baby at home, so he does his best, but.

the governmental website for covid information is now propaganda. not a joke, not hyperbole, not an exaggeration: it's genuinely the definition of propaganda. this is biased misinformation determined to push a political stance. it is being hosted on a government server. it looks like something you'd find in a "top 10 weird internet conspiracy stories (and their origins)" youtube video.

my brother called me when he saw it. he had me type it into google. for a second i legitimately thought that i had typed something wrong. we have both taught college: we have both said "a .gov site is usually a reliable resource." i just stared at my phone for a long, long time.

i thought about how when i was a kid, conspiracy theories were mostly fun and a little spooky. unserious. i remember reading some long, complicated website about how avril lavigne is dead. how bigfoot is real. it used to be funny-and-a-joke.

over seven million people (globally) have died from covid. america has the highest death rate with over 1.2 million people.

the thing is - every time a person dies from something like a mass shooting or poverty or treatable illness - we are told don't make it political. we are told it's just something that can happen. we are told it's sad but what can you do!

the president of the united states is using a government website to try to erase the very-real deaths that he personally caused due to a complete mismanagement of the pandemic. the president of the united states is using a government server to host propaganda, undermine science and medicine, and encourage distrust amongst his followers.

nothing is going to happen. nobody's gonna, like, do anything about it. it's a thursday today, and we are just going to move on from this like we have been moving on from everything else.

yesterday my brother was outside walking his dog, mask included. a guy in a truck pulls up and shouts something about covid and whatever the fuck else. my brother has a good sense of humor, described it to me as enthusiastic! i hadn't ever been catcalled before, this was new and therefore thrilling! i do see why you hate it, though. like. i have actual covid, does he want me to cough on him?

my brother doesn't get extra time off work anymore, because the cdc practically doesn't exist. my brother said i'm not exposing 200 students to covid. his boss shrugged and said: who cares? they're going to get it eventually anyway. like it isn't a pandemic.

like it's just a fucking thursday, and who cares about it.

[owlpero]

free will is all about headcanoning your faves as autistic

[redstonedust]

i appreciate the attempts a lot of game devs are making with gender neutral character creation, and i appreciate that it's actually a very difficult task to implement that depending on the game's base code. but it's so funny to me when you hear an uproar because some game has "entirely removed the gender option from character creation!!!!!" so you go to check it out and its just like

[demaparbat-hp]

Existential Nihilism Squad™

[noodles-and-tea]

Arcane: become human

[televisionforwhales]

Wild to think how invested I once was in captain america. They really put something in the winter soldier (2014). you had to be there

[reasonsforhope]

If you're feeling anxious or depressed about the climate and want to do something to help right now, from your bed, for free...

Start helping with citizen science projects

What's a citizen science project? Basically, it's crowdsourced science. In this case, crowdsourced climate science, that you can help with!

You don't need qualifications or any training besides the slideshow at the start of a project. There are a lot of things that humans can do way better than machines can, even with only minimal training, that are vital to science - especially digitizing records and building searchable databases

Like labeling trees in aerial photos so that scientists have better datasets to use for restoration.

Or counting cells in fossilized plants to track the impacts of climate change.

Or digitizing old atmospheric data to help scientists track the warming effects of El Niño.

Or counting penguins to help scientists better protect them.

Those are all on one of the most prominent citizen science platforms, called Zooniverse, but there are a ton of others, too.

Oh, and btw, you don't have to worry about messing up, because several people see each image. Studies show that if you pool the opinions of however many regular people (different by field), it matches the accuracy rate of a trained scientist in the field.

--

I spent a lot of time doing this when I was really badly injured and housebound, and it was so good for me to be able to HELP and DO SOMETHING, even when I was in too much pain to leave my bed. So if you are chronically ill/disabled/for whatever reason can't participate or volunteer for things in person, I highly highly recommend.

Next time you wish you could do something - anything - to help

Remember that actually, you can. And help with some science.