sirfrogsworth - Tumblr blog

[sirfrogsworth]

I ordered food for 5mg Mounjaro Froggie.

But I am now 10mg Mounjaro Froggie.

And now I have too much food.

I suppose that is a good thing in the end.

[sirfrogsworth]

I'm feeling it, but it is really subtle. Not sure if it will get worse or not, but this is much more tolerable than when I first started Mounjaro.

I guess we'll see if I spoke too soon.

#pukewatch2024

I finally got the next dose of Mounjaro. I've been trying to get this for about 4 months now but too many people wanted to use it for aesthetic reasons. My pharmacy had a single box and they put it aside for me. I have the best pharmacy in the world. They are so great.

It is double what I was taking. And I am a little worried I'm going to get sick. I'm hoping that I have a good tolerance from being on it for so long now. But it's hard to know if this drastic change will take some getting used to. I also skipped a step. I was supposed to go from 5 to 7.5. But they only had 10.

So I will either be puking tomorrow or I will be just fine. I guess we'll see which it is soon enough.

[sirfrogsworth]

I had to post some corrections on my eclipse post.

I've been even more diligent with fact checking ever since that John Wick gun magazine flip debacle.

I mean, I was pretty diligent before, but I made sure to double check pretty much everything from that point forward.

It sucks when you get things wrong. My heart sinks every single time. I try to track down how I got it wrong and make sure to learn from it.

But when something has been reblogged so many times and there is no way to reach everyone with the correction, it just feels like you let all those people down.

But the physics of light is incredibly complicated and I don't think my brain is working anywhere near 100% right now. It was probably a recipe for misunderstanding and then passing that misunderstanding along to others.

I don't know.

I think it is just going to feel bad until it doesn't and I'll move on and learn from it.

And try better in the future.

[sirfrogsworth]

I finally got the next dose of Mounjaro. I've been trying to get this for about 4 months now but too many people wanted to use it for aesthetic reasons. My pharmacy had a single box and they put it aside for me. I have the best pharmacy in the world. They are so great.

It is double what I was taking. And I am a little worried I'm going to get sick. I'm hoping that I have a good tolerance from being on it for so long now. But it's hard to know if this drastic change will take some getting used to. I also skipped a step. I was supposed to go from 5 to 7.5. But they only had 10.

So I will either be puking tomorrow or I will be just fine. I guess we'll see which it is soon enough.

[sirfrogsworth]

I'm worried that if I ever meet any of the YouTubers I follow in real life i am going to be shocked at how slow they speak.

"It's really nice to meet you, but I don't suppose you could speak approximately 1.75 times faster?"

[sirfrogsworth]

Watching the octopus doc on Disney.

Not to be confused with Doc Octopus on Disney.

It's narrated by Paul Rudd and he just has this calming way of narrating. Though I think he was uncomfortable saying, "special mating arm" and "she expels the sperm from her previous encounters."

They decided to go with "octopuses" as plural. Which is the most fun version to say. Better than fucking octopodes.

I just saw an octopus brawl. And you'd think that would be exciting because there are 16 arms involved. But, it turns out everyone on this planet fights the same.

In the end, we just hug.

Boxers end up hugging.

MMA fighters end up hugging.

Women MMA fighters end up... umm...

Fighting is hugging, is what I'm saying.

And it would seem that is no different for octopuses.

16 arms of glorious hug fighting.

[sirfrogsworth]

I'm prolific and pretentious.

That tracks.

[sirfrogsworth]

THIS!

This is perfection.

I finished Rebel Moon 2.

It's like... watching someone set money on fire.

It's best to watch it in spurts. That way the terrible-ness doesn't overwhelm.

I know I was just arguing with someone about how art is subjective and you can't declare a subjective thing terrible outside of an individual experience.

But there are some objective measures of artistic quality that I think Zack failed to meet. It didn't seem like he had an actual cohesive story in mind. The movie felt like he thought of a bunch of visual spectacles that were informed from his favorite childhood movies and he wanted to recreate them in his own style.

And instead of a story it felt like he was writing excuses.

"I want a character to have a lightsaber. So I am going to come up with an excuse for them to have one."

"I want a cool robot fight scene, so I am going to come up with an excuse for that to happen."

"I want a giant spider lady, so I'm going to make that a thing in this universe despite every other character being human."

And he just did that for every single visual spectacle he wanted to create.

I think the laziest writing was when he wanted to do cool flashbacks so he had all of the heroes sit around a table and tell each other their personal history. And the excuse was, "If we are going into battle together, we need to know who we are fighting beside."

And so they just went around the table explaining their tragic backstory like group therapy minus the talking stick.

And this movie took itself sooooo seriously. George Lucas had some self awareness and knew some of his shit was straight up goofy.

Zack is just... "I'M MAKING ART!"

I will say, there was one very funny moment in the movie. And it is only funny because of all of the super serious seriousness.

I took a picture of the funny moment.

You ready?

I just saw this and burst out laughing. Maybe it's only funny to me. I am a little sad they didn't add the "Sir" to his name.

I hope Tony got a nice piano out of this.

The best I can describe this movie is like a child playing with action figures. They will imagine little stories as they make their figures fight each other. And they don't really make much sense. But it doesn't matter because they are just worried about entertaining themselves and no one else.

[sirfrogsworth]

"I am a student of light" is a common photography parlance. That wasn't just my normal pretension.

[sirfrogsworth]

So... someone downvoted me for this.

And I've been downvoted for a lot of things before.

But I understood why I was downvoted on those things.

This makes no sense.

That is a legit helpful comment and some stranger on the internet cut my 2 upvotes in half and I am going to find them and I'm going to downvote them right on the nose.

The nerve!

[sirfrogsworth]

I think he finally decided not to copy and paste and steal someone else's content only to post bad information.

There are two nearly identical Boeing aircraft that are typically used as Air Force One, but there are not two Air Forces One.

Air Force One is a designation for any aircraft the president is aboard. It could be a vintage biplane and still be Air Force One.

All aircraft could potentially be Air Force One, but only one aircraft can be Air Force One at a time.

[sirfrogsworth]

I finished Rebel Moon 2.

It's like... watching someone set money on fire.

It's best to watch it in spurts. That way the terrible-ness doesn't overwhelm.

I know I was just arguing with someone about how art is subjective and you can't declare a subjective thing terrible outside of an individual experience.

But there are some objective measures of artistic quality that I think Zack failed to meet. It didn't seem like he had an actual cohesive story in mind. The movie felt like he thought of a bunch of visual spectacles that were informed from his favorite childhood movies and he wanted to recreate them in his own style.

And instead of a story it felt like he was writing excuses.

"I want a character to have a lightsaber. So I am going to come up with an excuse for them to have one."

"I want a cool robot fight scene, so I am going to come up with an excuse for that to happen."

"I want a giant spider lady, so I'm going to make that a thing in this universe despite every other character being human."

And he just did that for every single visual spectacle he wanted to create.

I think the laziest writing was when he wanted to do cool flashbacks so he had all of the heroes sit around a table and tell each other their personal history. And the excuse was, "If we are going into battle together, we need to know who we are fighting beside."

And so they just went around the table explaining their tragic backstory like group therapy minus the talking stick.

And this movie took itself sooooo seriously. George Lucas had some self awareness and knew some of his shit was straight up goofy.

Zack is just... "I'M MAKING ART!"

I will say, there was one very funny moment in the movie. And it is only funny because of all of the super serious seriousness.

I took a picture of the funny moment.

You ready?

I just saw this and burst out laughing. Maybe it's only funny to me. I am a little sad they didn't add the "Sir" to his name.

I hope Tony got a nice piano out of this.

The best I can describe this movie is like a child playing with action figures. They will imagine little stories as they make their figures fight each other. And they don't really make much sense. But it doesn't matter because they are just worried about entertaining themselves and no one else.

[sirfrogsworth]

I'm slowly coming to terms with the idea that I might need to monetize my photography. I really wanted to keep that away from my financial situation, but I don't have a lot of other great options.

I'm trying to brainstorm things that could make me stand out. I think I want to lean into pet photography. But I love photographing people and objects too. I'm not going to limit myself.

But one thing I was thinking about was allowing people to show me a sample photograph of what they want, and then recreating it for them.

Let's say a local theater actor needs a headshot. And they have a picture of someone else's headshot they really love. And they want their headshot to look similar. I can reverse engineer the sample photo and match it. Like how you bring in a picture from a magazine for the haircut you want.

This is a skill I have that I'm not sure every photographer could offer. And it might give someone confidence they will like the end result.

Perhaps I could even charge a little extra for this service.

[sirfrogsworth]

I'm not doing great about not getting into internet arguments right now.

I think I'm going to step away. I said what I needed to say.

I feel like they perfectly demonstrated exactly what I was talking about.

Cisgender is simply a communicative tool of differentiation. In a world that is currently having myriad discussions about trans issues, how else are we supposed to differentiate? What term would they prefer?

[sirfrogsworth]

I feel like they perfectly demonstrated exactly what I was talking about.

Cisgender is simply a communicative tool of differentiation. In a world that is currently having myriad discussions about trans issues, how else are we supposed to differentiate? What term would they prefer?

[sirfrogsworth]

Now these are the neighborhood updates I was hoping for.

Finally this app is paying off.

We haven't had this much excitement in our area since the Mad Pooper of 2013.

I think I will dub this dubious defecator The Duece Dropper.

[sirfrogsworth]

Photo Restoration Part 3: Dealing with Dongs

I think a major theme of Part 3 is going to be "direct flash is my arch nemesis" with a touch of "you can't save every photo."

Here we have a group shot taken with direct flash... my arch nemesis.

The flash got nearly everyone but there was a drastic falloff of light for the girl on the left. Beyond that, everyone's skin tones were wildly inconsistent because they were either closer or farther from the light source. And in these situations, you just have to dig in and and start fixing faces one by one.

With the new people selection tool, Lightroom will detect every single person in this photograph and let me adjust them individually. It can separate hair, face, lips, skin, and clothing. And if the photo is zoomed enough, you can even adjust the whites of the eyes and the iris individually.

That facial sunburn you see is Lightroom detecting her face and letting me adjust it in isolation.

-----------------------------

There is an expression "God is in the details."

Due to being a heathen, I've been meaning to find a new expression that means roughly the same thing. Let me workshop a few ideas right quick...

Micromanaging pixels delivers a superior cumulative result.

Your deity of choice resides in the numerous small adjustments that deliver a superior end product.

Obsessing over things people may not notice makes things more gooder.

I'm sure I'll figure it out.

Basically it means if you do a bunch of tiny things they will add up to create a big overall effect.

So, you may not even notice the sunlight is bouncing off the green grass and turning all the metal on the swingset green. But when I take that reflected green light away from the metal it just makes a little more sense to the brain.

And you may not have noticed that the detail in the flower on Katrina's head was completely gone, but your brain just feels a little more satisfied when it is restored.

Okay, how about this...

"Attention to detail makes the brain go tingle."

It almost rhymes and everything!

Alright, fine. God can stay in the details.

-----------------------------

Sometimes the best thing you can do for a photo is make sure that people can see the thing. If there is a thing that really needs to be seen, you have to crank up whatever dials you have at your disposal to make it the star of the photo. And in this case, the star is Grandma's giant hand-made doily...

That's a fine looking D.O.U.S. (Doily of Unusual Size).

All of that intricate detail is still in the photo. It's just a bit lost and needs to be found. The clarity and texture sliders in Lightroom are great for enhancing small details without getting those crunchy artifacts sharpening filters can manifest.

-----------------------------

Distractions!

Avoiding distractions is probably one of the most important aspects of photography and photo editing. And in this photo we have a giant car sized distraction.

With the car, this photo becomes dated. The make and model and year of that car give away a time period when everything else in the photo is almost timeless. So, removing the car seems like the best thing to do for this photo.

In the past, I probably would have employed a mixture of techniques to delete the car. Cloning, content aware fill, the patch tool—I would have found places in other spots of the photo that looked similar to that spot in the photo and just massaged it until it looked correct. A very tedious and time consuming process.

Or I would have cropped the photo if I was tired.

But with Adobe's new generative fill, I can just circle the car and hit a button. And it does an incredible job of filling in that space with perfectly matched dirt and rocks and shrubbery.

Now the photo looks like it could have been taken in the 40s or 50s or 60s.

-----------------------------

My nemesis is back. Back with a vengeance.

Direct flash, you are killing me.

Sometimes you have to accept that you cannot get the image to where you wish it could be and focus on what you can do to improve it. Identify the major issues and then problem solve how you can mitigate them.

The big issues in this photo...

Overexposed.

Skin tones are wildly varied due to distance from light.

Hard shadows that are very distracting.

Bright background causing poor subject separation.

That lady's giant hair.

And a bonus issue that only lives in my mind...

The flash overpowered the light on the right hand side and it doesn't look like it is turned on.

So, I reduced the overall exposure, evened out all of the skin tone issues one face at a time, reduced the background exposure, and I did my best to eliminate those distracting hard shadows.

Unfortunately, the woman on the left had dark hair that was mixing with the shadow and I had a very hard time differentiating what was hair and shadow.

I tried many different techniques to make her beautifully 80s large ball of hair look like it had a natural edge, but I just couldn't make it work with the energy I had.

But did you see the light? LOOK AT THE LIGHT!

So, yeah... I couldn't completely fix this photo, but I could make the light more light-y.

-----------------------------

Well, poop.

Direct flash.

Again.

In this photo the main issue is loss of detail due to overexposure. The light in the windows and the light in the white clothing was too intense and blew out to pure white. In the past there wasn't actually much that could be done about this. But with the magic of generative fill, this can be addressed.

Am I talking too much about generative fill? IT IS JUST SO HELPFUL, OKAY?

So I went around to each little patch of window and asked Photoshop to just fill it with general shrubbery. But I also went in on the dress and the flower crown and asked Photoshop to fill that in with a texture.

-----------------------------

Here we have a Greek castle or fort or... ancient structure.

This one was fairly straightforward. But there was no sky detail at all and there was a haze toward the top of the castle. Lightroom has a relatively new slider called "dehaze" and I thought, "maybe I should try that." And... it totally worked! Always happy when something does what it says on the tin.

Photoshop also has a newer feature that automatically inserts a new sky. And because everything needs to be monetized, if you want access to additional skies you have to buy a sky bundle. Before you know it they will be selling subscriptions to skies. Perhaps a sky-of-the-month club.

Thankfully the feature also lets you import your own skies, so one day I am going to sort through every interesting sky I have ever photographed to avoid all of this buy-a-sky malarky.

-----------------------------

Next up we have an adorable family outing that was tarnished by some lewd graffiti.

There is always some dick drawing dicks to dick up your photographs.

Thankfully this is an easy job for content aware fill.

Did you think I was going to say generative fill? Because I am in love with generative fill and want to marry it?

Generative fill can take ~20 seconds to do its thing and I usually reserve it for more complicated tasks. Content aware fill is actually a very powerful way to remove simple things from photos and works nearly instantly.

Though I wonder if this tool was really "aware" of what it was covering up.

But then a little devil on my shoulder influenced me to go another way with this photo.

Photoshop can erase, but it can also... create!

Did you find all 6?

I originally meant to send this to Katrina as a prank. But I accidentally sent it to my Aunt Denise instead.

Thankfully my aunt is very cool and maybe a little oblivious to penis graffiti.

And then I had to tell Katrina that I sent the prank to my aunt instead of her.

And I'm pretty sure she is laughing *at* me and not *with* me, but as long as people are laughing I am happy.

Also, I think autocorrect changed bonafide from bonerfide and ruined Katrina’s amazing pun. Apple is just killing all of our jokes. 

-----------------------------

Distractions! Again!

One of the core teachings in any beginner photography class is to minimize distractions and draw attention towards your subject. And I just felt this scene was very busy and drew attention away.

So, I deleted half of the people.

Am I... am I Thanos?

-----------------------------

Last photo!

This is probably the stereotypical image people think of when it comes to photo restoration. It has all of the classic photo trauma. Torn edges, a giant crease, washed out contrast.

We can rebuild it! We have the technology!

The only thing I couldn't fix was that nobody had eyeballs. There were just blank voids where their eyes should be.

And I wondered to myself, "Perhaps A.I. has become advanced enough to restore these folks' eyeballs."

Ummmmm...

Errrrrrrr...

You know what... the voids were fine.

So, that is the end of this photo restoration journey. I hope you found this interesting. If you want to see all of the before and after photos, I made a Flickr gallery here. There is a small icon at the top of the page that looks like a computer monitor with a play button inside—that is the slideshow function which makes it very easy to flip back and forth.

And if you are in need of restoration services please feel free to send me a message. Just know that not every photo is a good candidate—though most photos can be improved to some degree.

Photo Restoration Project - Part 1

A long time ago, Katrina sent me some old photos of her family I could restore. Her parents have been helping me from afar for years and I really wanted to do something nice for them. Unfortunately my dad got much worse and I pretty much forgot about this project for quite some time.

But then I decided to visit Katrina in Orlando and we discussed having dinner with her parents and I remembered these photos. So I thought I would fix them up so I could present them as a gift in person.

The first and most important photo was from her parents wedding.

Old photo prints can fade over time due to UV light exposure. From what I understand, different colors fade at different rates and red/orange tones tend to be the least susceptible to this fading. Thankfully all of the color information is still there, it's just that the darks are not as dark and the lights are not as light. The dynamic range got squeezed like an accordion. However, if you do a levels adjustment on the red, blue, and green channels individually, you can unsqueeze the accordion and balance everything back to the way it was.

But you can't always save everything and there may be other damage that needs fixing. If something becomes pure white, there is no way to restore that detail. Thankfully I was able to use the new generative fill feature to bring back detail in the dress, the flowers, and the tuxedo shirt.

And because I hate front facing flash and how it makes colors look ugly and sterile, I may have also added a marble floor and pillars.

Next up was a photo of Anastasia, Katrina's mom, protesting Henry Kissinger on behalf of her home country of Greece. This suffered from the same color fading issues.

What made this one a little more tricky was an uneven fading. The left side had to be adjusted independently and the top was even more faded. I had to isolate the trees to bring back their color. And the protest signs were difficult to read, so I enhanced those as well.

Next we have this lovely photo of Anastasia tending to some house plants.

This photo was actually in decent shape. It lost a little contrast, had a little bit of fading, and her top retained almost no detail I could recover. Recovering accurate skin tones is probably one of the most important skills I learned when restoring these photos. I wanted to keep that filmic look of the era while avoiding making people look jaundiced or pale. Lightroom's new masking feature that let's you isolate every aspect of the people it detects in a photo. This made fixing skin tones much easier. I could isolate just her face or her lips or her hair or her eyes and make precise individual adjustments. This process could have taken a great deal longer without this feature. But, I brought back proper contrast and color, added a little bit of detail to her top with gen fill, and hopefully got fairly accurate skin tones as well.

Next up, forward facing flash strikes again in a photo of Mike and Anastasia during Christmas.

Film did not do well in low light. If it was indoors and nighttime, you pretty much had no choice but to use flash. But a flash is a very small, bright light source and this causes a very unflattering result on humans. Today we have much more powerful flashes with rotating heads. We can bounce the light into the ceiling or off a wall and increase the size of the light source to get a more flattering result.

In this photo I wasn't able to do much, so I just balanced the skin tones and brought out some hidden detail and called it a day. It's still a lovely memory and thankfully film has such character that it negates a lot of the unflattering aspects of direct flash.

Next up is some cuteness...

A big priority when editing photos is to make sure the subjects are the star of the photo. And in this one their faces were a bit obscured in shadow. There was also a lot of haze in the background hiding the beautiful vista. Not to mention when I cleared that haze, there was this super faint hint of something in the sky. I can't tell if it was a rainbow, but I decided to believe it was a rainbow. The only thing that I am still struggling with, and this seems to be common with a lot of old photos, is green. Getting a good, saturated, natural green to look right has been very difficult. Everything I try ends up looking toxic or fake. The only thing that ends up looking right with the rest of the photo is more of a yellow-y brown. It's something I'll have to work on as I learn, but as long as the overall photo looks balanced and natural, I'm okay with not perfectly nailing the greens.

Up next we have a lovely scene on a Greek dock...

As far as editing goes, this was pretty basic. I just undid the fading, adjusted the skin tones, replaced the blown-out sky, and made the colors pop. But I think this is actually one of my favorite before and after shots. I just love how such a simple fix brought this scene to life.

A new car is a big deal and Anastasia looks so proud here...

This image has another common issue in addition to the typical fading of colors. It has a yellowish orange color cast. This could have been an issue with the film used or the development process or a chemical reaction on the print. A color cast is a lot like looking through colored glasses. It's like a translucent color material was put on top of the image. This can be a little trickier to deal with, but if you know your color theory, you might already know the solution. Blue is the opposite of yellow/orange on the color wheel, so if you introduce blue to the image it should balance out. Also, add a sky if it was missing.

Next up we have a landscaping project...

This one wasn't too tricky, but there was one interesting issue I had to address. All light has a color temperature. Daylight has a temperature of around 5500K. But the inside of the garage was being lit by reflected light and so that light took on the color temperature of the things it was bouncing off of. So I had to mask out the people and the car and address the color temperature inside the garage to make everything look balanced. Also, the green fought me hard on this one. And with the theme of this picture being plants, I felt I really needed to find a tone that worked. I think I finally got there, but I spent way too much time in the color picker doing trial and error of green tones. Also, new sky.

With this next one I actually did a pretty thorough explanation of how I edited it. But this was probably my favorite puzzle to solve from this collection of photos.

I'll do the abridged explanation...

The physical photograph was printed on a paper with a very heavy texture. And when it was scanned, the light from the scanner bounced off that texture and created a pattern of unwanted highlights.

I was worried this was impossible to fix and I almost gave up on this photo. But after one final Google search I discovered something called "Fast Fourier Transform." It's a mathematical formula that can be used to detect patterns. And the image editing software Affinity Photo, just so happens to have a filter called FFT denoise that helps you remove unwanted patterns from scanned photos.

And thanks to that filter, I was able to remove a substantial amount of that pattern...

Then I did my standard clean up techniques...

Oh, and I decided to try learning how to colorize.

Photoshop has a new set of experimental filters and a colorization tool is one of them. It is not great yet, but it is a great starting place. Instead of having to hand paint every single thing in the photo, Photoshop gave me a base to work with and I could take it from there with traditional techniques.

That's all I have the energy for today, but there are a bunch of cool restorations to talk about. Hopefully you all find this interesting. It was such a great gift to give to Katrina's parents. And spending that time with them and making them happy felt like I was with my own parents again. So we all got a gift in that wonderful evening.

Part 2 coming as soon as I have the energy!