Goodbye photoshoptalent.com (PST)

I'm very disappointed to find out this morning that one of my favorite websites has gone kaput. At first I thought its owner had become a victim of the worlwide economic crisis and had to give up his site.

However, that was not the case.

As he pointed out in his explanation dated June 9, 2009:

"To my deepest regret I have to inform you that the PST server had a major hardware failure and everything on the hard drive was wiped."

To keep a long story short, because of that, he had to redo the entire site from scratch and decided to give it a new name, pxleyes.com.

The good thing is MisterMonty and his wonderful site (despite the new name) is still around... and it looks like he's going to be around for a long time.

The sad thing is, all the points/credits I've accumulated before are now gone. Likewise, two of my tutorials were also wiped out.

What's sadder is that there are those who've posted at least one of my tutorials on their sites (particularly my "How to Make a Realistic LCD HDTV in Photoshop" tutorial) and claimed it as their own.

Unfortunately for them, they posted the tutorial with the images/screen captures still referenced to photoshoptalent.com. And since photoshoptalent is now gone, so are the screen captures on their sites.

Check these out...

Here are portions of their source codes...

This one's from http://photoshoptutoriz.com/2009/05/photoshop-tutorial-make-a-realistic-lcd-hdtv/


and this one's from http://badijala.com/showthread.php?p=684678

Anyway, because of this, I've decided to post those tutorials here on my blog (give me a few days for that). I didn't do that before out of my respect for MisterMonty and his photoshoptalent.com site. Anyway, I will also be sending the tutorials again to MisterMonty so that he'll be able to put them back up on his new site (that is if he still wants them).

Goodbye photoshoptalent... Long live pxleyes!!!

Third Time's in 3D!

Yes, it's the third installation of the Ice Age franchise... but that's not what I'm hinting at in the title...

It was my son's third time to be in a movie theater. His first one was at the SM Mall of Asia's Imax Theater (Madagascar 2) and the second was just two weeks ago in Trinoma (Transformers 2 - Revenge of the Fallen).

Then, yesterday, it was at Trinoma's Cinema 4... Ice Age 3 - Dawn of the Dinosaurs... IN 3D!

It's quite an experience, and that goes for all of us (myself, my wife, my brother and mother)... with the exception of my son who didn't seem to be impressed with the 3-dimensional magic. But I believe it was because the glasses bothered him (more on this later).

The 3-dimensional trickery was pretty impressive, really.

We were seated at Row "N" (the farthest from the screen, as far as the "ordinary" seating is concerned) and, as soon as the movie started, my wife said "parang ang lapit..." ("it feels so near...").

Take note, the glasses do not have any magnifying qualities. I tried taking the glasses off a few times to see what the images looked like. All I saw were blurry images... or, to be more precise, "double images". But it's nothing like the 3D illusions we have been accustomed to seeing in some children's books (with the cardboard red and blue glasses). It was (almost) void of any visble and distracting misaligned blue and red images.

However, I strongly believe the trick is quite similar since when I looked at the glasses from an angle, I saw traces of very thin red and green films in the lenses. In addition, I think the glasses also have polarizing qualities which separate the images and allow only one set of images to be seen by each eye.

Anyway, the only problem I had with the glasses is that they don't fit very well and kept on sliding down my nose. My son held on to his glasses to keep them in place, but he eventually took them off about two-thirds of the way through the movie.

Text on the sticker reads:

Warning: For in-theatre movie-viewing only.

Glasses do NOT block sunlight. Outdoor use

may be hazardous.

---ANTI-THEFT TAG INSTALLED---

Dolby and the double-D are registered trademarks

of Dolby Laboratories, Inc. Patents Pending

But generally, it was great fun seeing the show pop out of the screen.

As for the movie Ice Age 3... well, much of the characters' comedic antics were really funny (especially Sid and the saber-toothed squirrels Scrat and Scratte). But the story... hmmm...

Three-and-a-half stars out of five.