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Warren Shea

Archive for the ‘Tutorials’ Category

Tutorial: CSS3 DIV Shadow

Tuesday, January 17th, 2012 at 2:36 pm

Purpose of this tutorial
To put a nice, subtle shadow just below a DIV. This shadow fades out to the background and is alpha transparent.

What you need to know
HTML and CSS

Note
While this generally works on any website, it doesn’t work too well with my themes, other than Google+ theme. I suggest you use that theme to properly see this.

Example

Code

<style>
  .box_example {
    margin:auto;
    background:#fff;
    border:1px solid #aaa;
    width:100px;
    height:100px;
    border:1px solid #666;
    position:relative;
  }
  .box_example:after{
    content:”shadow”;
    position:absolute;
    z-index:-1;
    bottom:2px;
    left:7px;
    right:7px;
    box-shadow: 0 0 10px #000;
    border-radius:100px / 7px;
  }
</style>

<div class=”box_example”></div>

Explanation
The key things are
.box_example’s position:relative
and…all of .box_example:after‘s CSS.
I guess playing around with the CSS to get the shadow you want. There’s not much else to discuss…lol worst tutorial ever :)

My ramblings
I just found this out through a co-worker and I’m using it everywhere. I think it’s a very simple, subtle way to make an item pop out a little more. FYI he first saw it on LinkedIn, here developer.linkedin.com

Tutorials: Photography – Fine Tuning the photo manipulation process

Tuesday, July 12th, 2011 at 12:11 am

Sorry for the looong post! I know I said I was going to work on warrenshea.com but instead, I spent tonight learning about photo manipulation. To be honest, I thought my Adobe Photoshop skillz were good. Not great, but pretty good. But no, there’s so much to learn and do with this program, it’s pretty ridiculous. Anyways, I spent some time Googling photo manipulation.
“How to get the background white”
“How to remove darkened corners”
“How to sharpen an image”

They all led me to some Photoshop skills. You can see the difference in each shot as the quality of the photo is increased. The order of changes for WHY I did them:

1. Adjusting the tone/color. I find that sometimes the tone can be off….doing either of these will make it a nicer one. A blue instead of a yellow, stuff like that.
2. Adjusting the levels to increase the lightness around a figure.
3. Lens Correction to increase the lightness around the corners of the shot.
4. Vibrance to increase some color contrast
5. High Pass filter, to increase sharpness. I LOVE this step, it looks fantastic after.

Click the image for a larger image
Wargreymon step-by-step process

Anyways, I learned that the 8 hours of photography last weekend were wasted. The lightsources I chose to lighten some things caused a dark shadow behind my figure. No amount of Lens Correction can fix it….sigh. The shots I took when I first got my light box are better to manipulate. Really though, I need more light for one. And two, a better camera. Doubt I’ll be able to get the latter any time soon. Maybe I can do something about the former…need to hit up a Henry’s.