How to Create a Photo Silhouette

September 17, 2015Computers & Electronics, Photo & Video, TechnologyPicasa, silhouetteadmin

If you are wondering how you can create a photo silhouette with some free software then you could try using Google’s Picasa shoto software to get quite a good effect.

If you use the Neon effect tool in Picasa then this might give you what you are after. Using the Picasa Neon effect is simple and depending on how you use it you can get a silhouette effect or else you can have a level of detail in your photo. Personally I wanted to create a kind of chalk outline sketch effect which blanked out the features and just left an outline of the body. The good thing with this though is that you also get some of the internal lines of the image rather than just having a plain black silhouette.

You can get a good silhouette effect using Picasa's neon tool — You can get a good silhouette effect using Picasa’s neon tool

How to Create This Effect

To create this effect firstly open the photo you want to edit in Picasa. Although Picasa does create a backup of your photo itself, you may want to create a copy so that you can play around with that and not worry about messing up the original.

The first thing that I do is to crop the image to how I want it to look. The crop tool is on the first edit page and you can choose what format you want to use to crop the image to: you could keep the image in the same ratio as the photo was taken or you can just crop it manually to a size that you want.

Using the Neon Effect

The Neon Effect icon is on the last page of the edit icons. I actually first used the black and white tool to change my photo to black and white before using the neon tool. In this way the colour I chose in the neon tool would not be clouded by any other colours in the picture.

With the neon effect you have two decisions to make:

firstly, the colour that you want to use for your neon effect. You can choose any colour you like with the drop picker. and you can choose how dark or light you want the colour to be.
secondly, how much fade you want to apply to the picture. The less fade you apply, the more the rest of the picture will be dark and you will just have highlighted areas. The picture on the right (and the one at the top) have no fade applied to them so that they appear more as monochromatic pictures or a silhouette as per the top one.

Other Picasa Tools

There are many tools you can get in Picasa that you pay for in other software, it really is pretty versatile. Obviously it doesn’t come close to tools like PhotoShop that you may need if you are doing detailed changes to images but for the everyday photographer it has almost everything that you need.

I find the crop tool is one of the most useful and also the fill light tool for those photos that come out a bit dark due to lack of light. You can also use the ‘I’m Feeling Lucky’ button which sometimes can be a bit hit and miss but other times can give you a quick good result!

If you do use the fill light tool then it can also be good to add a bit more contrast. You are pretty much in charge of what you want to do and can cancel and undo any of the changes you have made if you do something wrong.

How Do I Back Up My Computer?

September 12, 2015Computers & Electronics, Home & Garden, Internet, Technologybackup, computeradmin

I think a lot of people live in a world where they know the chances of their computer crashing are significant and yet they still put off backing up their data. I think in most cases this is due to their lack of knowledge of how easy it can be to back up your data. I know people who occasionally add the files in their documents folder onto a CD or thumb drive but it is not very frequent and chances are if their laptop or PC were to fail they would lose data for sure.

I myself have had no less than 1 PC and 2 Laptops die on me completely, without a hope of recovery, in the last 3 years. The first laptop died due to someone else trying to fix something by removing the operating system and not being able to replace it. I stupidly had not backed up my data before allowing them to do this, my bad. The 2nd one, the PC, died a few months later, it was a few years old and I had started slowly copying the data over but had not finished backing up before it went. Lucky for me I had a friend who, with a lot of effort, managed to rescue the data from both machines. So if you are wondering how do I back up my computer then I’ll tell you the easy way that I do it (although there are other ways but for someone who doesn’t want to delve into lots of settings this one is simple),

Set Up An Easy Plug and Play Back Up

And so it came that said friend decided that I needed an easy back up facility and bought me a Seagate FreeAgent GoFlex Drive with I think 500 Gb of space. Now I am sure that there are other easy plug and go back up drives available but as I have used this one I wanted to share my experience with it. Basically it has software installed that you can just run and once you have that installed, every time you plug the drive in afterwards it will automatically detect and new or changed files and back them up to the drive.

That is as simple as it is – plug it in and it will back up for you. For someone like me, who never quite gets round to doing a manual backup, it is a godsend. And that was shown to be the case when my 3rd computer, a laptop that was only about 18 months old, also died. Lucky for me that just the day before I had plugged in the backup (I had actually plugged it in to look for a file from one of my old computers that was stored on it but of course as I did that it backed up too).

So really, for less than 100 dollars (on Amazon anyway) you can have a very easy back up system that is suitable for any technophobe to use and really is the simplest back up out there as far as I am concerned. Don’t leave it until it is too late – it is not always possible to recover data from dead computers or can be expensive so save yourself the worry and trouble by getting a back up now.

You can check out the GoFlex drive on Amazon US and the equivalent in the UK below:

How Does Tattooing Work?

August 5, 2015Beauty & Personal Careadmin

Getting a Tattoo

If you are thinking of getting a tattoo then it is a good idea to know a bit about the theory of how tattooing works and how the ink actually becomes permanently embedded into the skin. There are some basic ways of having tattoos done – for example in Thailand tattoos are sometimes applied using a bamboo cane sharpened into a point, but for this article we are just focusing on the usual manner of applying a tattoo by machine.

Of course the whole process is quite complicated but what we are concentrating on here is the basic process of tattooing and how the ink remains permanently on the skin so that the tattoo does not fade away.

The tattoo is inked on by the tattooist using an electrically powered needle that acts in a manner similar to a dentist’s drill. The electronic drill has a hollow needle at the end that inserts ink underneath the skin. The needle moves up and down at a speed of between 50 and 3,000 times each minute, and on every movement it punctures the skin and leaves the ink in the 2nd layer, the dermis.

The top layer of the skin as you probably know is the epidermis and that is the layer that frequently loses skin cells so that they can be continually replenished over time. The dermis is much more stable than the epidermis and so the reason the ink is inserted in that layer is that it will remain in there and not be removed by the continual shedding of the outer skin layer.

So initially the tattooist will mark out the outline of your chosen design on your skin either by using a stencil or by freehand drawing, particularly if it is a custom design. They will then start tattooing in the design with the electronic needle with some black ink (depending on the design) before shading it in with thicker ink of whatever colour or colours you might choose. Once this is done they fill in any blocks of colour in between.

How Painful Is Having a Tattoo?

Inserting a needle into the dermis is to a certain degree going to be painful so you should be prepared for this. People have different pain threshold levels so it may not feel as bad to some people as it does to others. Also some areas of the body are more painful than others and this may depend on a number of factors including the nerves around that area and the amount of fatty or muscular tissue there. However, if you get a tattooist with a gentle hand it should not cause too much pain! I have to say that when I had my tattoo done it was pretty painful (on my lower back) but then maybe I am just a wimp!

I Forgot to Deauthorize My Computer for iTunes

July 31, 2015Computers & Electronicsauthorize, deauthorize, itunesadmin

OK, so this happened to me, not just once, but a few times. I had an old PC, 2 old laptops, maybe 3, that became defunct and I either gave them away or ditched them depending on what state they were in. But I forgot to deauthorize my computers in iTunes. Urgh, and now I have hit the 5 computer limit of the number of machines that iTunes will let me play my songs on.

If this is you, and maybe you have already hit 5 and can’t authorize your new machine, then do not fear, there is a way round this. I discovered this when I set up my latest new PC and wanted to load iTunes on there. Luckily it was the 5th machine that I had authorized but I knew that only one of the other machines I still had in my possession so I also knew that there would come a point where I would likely want to authorize another new machine and I wanted to preempt that.

So basically what you need to do is to go to your account info page and you can deauthorize all of your computers – yes it is all or nothing! Then you can reauthorize the ones you are actually using.

You just need to enter your apple id and password to get to the account settings page so make sure you know this info.

Then you will get the option to deauthorize as shown below. Now you don’t see the actual deauthorize option on my screen shot below (that is why I have added it manually in the place you would normally see it) – because you are only allowed to do this once a year (at least I assume that is why you don’t see the button here – it may also be because I only have one PC authorized right now and I can do that from the store menu, so that may be it.

Spikymouse.com

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