just some thoughts about the project

today in class, some groups presented their projects.  ours (TopsBottom) will be presented on Thursday.  our group is meeting tomorrow again from 4-8pm at CSB 115.  most of that will be devoted to tinkering with Facebook again.

our wonderful Jill miraculously connected our code/server to Facebook.  i have yet to explore exactly what she did, though she sent an email specifying the steps she took and what we would need to take to understand the workings of it…

but now, all that we need to do is create the code, update the Facebook app and add features such as buttons and links and functions.  i say, “all that we need,” knowing that it will be much more complicated than we can ever imagine.  there are always bugs that crop up.  impossibly little and ridiculous bugs.  so at the end of our last meeting, last week wednesday, i started trying to create a nice, shiny, attractive lid bottom.  it was actually quite difficult.

i had forgotten how … limiting Adobe Photoshop can be.  I copied an image from Google images.  I opened it in Photoshop, got rid of the “Real Fact” on it… then adjusted the contrast, brightness, color and pixelation of the thing to make it look as appealing as possible.  That was okay.  It still took some grueling time but it was okay.

THEN, the problem of changing the colors of the outside edges of the lid bottom got difficult.  I remembered using Photoshop before and i KNOW that there’s a way to change the color to a shiny ruby red or a dark blue with the same luminance and reflecting qualities of the original.  However, I kept getting light, washed-out colors that were not satisfactory whatsoever.  The technique I used first of all was to copy only the area that I want the color to change, which was essentially a thin outer circle.  Then I could modify that into many reiterations with different colors and then paste it back onto the original and wallah!  I can have multiple colored lids.  Most of my time was swallowed up by simply erasing pixels to create a smooth curve or to blend the colors because it looked to jagged.  I’m sure there’s an Unsharp Mask or Sharpen tool that could easily solve my problems but I just can’t find it.  I suppose I can google it.

Look at our project page on the wiki for preliminary images:

 http://cogsci121.wetpaint.com/page/Images+and+Screenshots