I’ve just read the first press confirmation of the recent rumours that Conexant’s set-top box business is to be sold to NXP. I wonder what Conexant is planning to do now given that BMP was supposedly the division that was set for highest growth over the next few years?

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Caerlaverock Castle Thistle, originally uploaded by David A G Wilson.

If you’ve read any of my previous posts, you’ve probably seen me mention Flickr Explore. This is a list of the 500 “most interesting” photos uploaded to Flickr each day where “interestingness” is defined using a secret algorithm known only to a small number of Flickr insiders. The general consensus is that it is some weighted measure based on the number of times a picture is viewed, the number of people who mark it as a favourite, the number of comments it receives with, possibly, some additional factors related to number of groups it is added to and the particular users who look at it.

Regardless of the actual weighting, though, I would expect that photos added to Explore would have to see some kind of traffic, whether that is views, comments or favourites. This image, however, has me really confused. It jumps into and out of Explore on a day-by-day basis. When it is in the list, it is generally near the top (currently it’s at position 30, for example) but then it will drop out of the top 500 completely. The weird thing, however, is that it gets practically no traffic (total of 3 comments, 109 views as of this writing) and can jump into or out of Explore with absolutely no change in its viewings.

The only conclusions I can draw from this are that something is happening to the other photos uploaded on that day that is reducing their interestingness enough to let mine pop back into the list. Given the lack of interest in this shot, I can also assume that February 5th, 2008 was a slow day for Flickr uploads if this is the 30th most interesting photo for that day.

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Rays After The Storm, originally uploaded by David A G Wilson.

Living on a hill offers great opportunities for landscape photography from the comfort of your own room. This shot was taken this morning out of the bedroom window. We had a storm last night and woke up to spectacular skies. This shot was processed from a raw file using Photomatix.

“>Research company Frost & Sullivan has just awarded my employer, Luminary Micro its 2008 Global Entrepreneurial Company Award. Apparently this came as a very pleasant surprise since Frost & Sullivan conduct their research for this award “under cover” – you don’t know you are in the running for it until it is awarded. Congratulations to Jean-Anne, Jim, Arline and the other execs who obviously impressed the Frost people a great deal!

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Hamilton Pool, originally uploaded by David A G Wilson.

I finally got a chance to play with some of the techniques that Ben Willmore talked about during the Photoshop seminar last week and here’s what I came up with. I’m very much happier with this version of the image than I was with the original since the sky was always rather overexposed for my liking. It’s incredible just how much difference using a more saturated sky and a subtle vignette makes to the overall image.

If you are interested in what I did, read on for the play-by-play…

When I was originally working on this image, I had tried to replace the sky but ran into problems generating a mask that handled the tree area on the right well. Despite using some techniques that Dave Cross had talked about in a previous Photoshop seminar, I couldn’t get rid of some nasty fringing. With the move to CS3, however, and the magic eraser tool, it was no problem to fix this now. I duplicated the image and used magic eraser to get rid of the sky then used the resulting layer to create a mask.

The new sky actually comprises two layers. There’s the basic sky itself and a gradient to darken it somewhat towards the top right. Rather than applying the mask I created to both layers separately, I used a clipping group with the bottom layer generated from the mask and the two grouped layers above it for the sky and gradient. This way, I only have 1 layer to modify to refine the mask rather than 2 independent layer masks which just happen to contain the same thing.

Although the new mask did a great job around the trees, I wasn’t too happy with the edges around the rock overhang – a slight fringe was visible – so I tweaked this using a technique I learned a couple of years ago. I made a selection containing the areas that showed the fringing then added a 1 pixel Guassian blur to the mask in that area. Keeping the selection active, I then used Curves to increase and decrease the contrast of the mask. This has the effect of very slightly expanding or contracting the mask and let me tune the edge very precisely.

After this, I added a new Curves adjustment layer to bring out some of the texture in the foreground rocks and a second to vignette the image and draw attention to the waterfall and overhang area in the centre. In the past, I would have used a soft black brush, painted black into the areas I wanted to darken and used either Normal, Darken, Multiply or Overlay blending mode and a lowish opacity (20-40%) to apply a vignette. Using a curves adjustment layer and a layer mask provides far more subtle results, I reckon, and will definitely be the way I do this in future.

Overall, I really feel I got my money’s worth last week and now have a version of a well-loved image I am finally delighted with.