May 20, 2009

Wednesday Illustrations: Swine flu, Gang bangers, & more

• Illustrated masks:
  • The Vader Project features “100 reimagined helmets.”
  • Gizmodo rounds up some awesomely illustrated anti-flu masks from Mexico.
• Chicago’s gang cards of the ’70s are a particularly odd form of folk art. I imagine my uncle cracking these thugs’ heads back in the day.
• The Rare Book Room site “has been constructed as an educational site intended to allow the visitor to examine and read some of the great books of the world.”
• Paper Moon brings beautiful monochrome illustration to 2D gaming.
• Urban infrastructure:
  • Subway systems of the world, presented on the same scale.
  • Triptrop creates slick heat maps on the fly to show how far by subway any point in New York is from any other.
  • Perpetual Kid offers manhole cover coasters.

Brief HDR bits

• In talking to photographers recently, we’ve heard that clients are requesting “that HDR look”–i.e. the somewhat wonky, overprocessed look often seen in places like the Flickr HDR pool. With that look in mind, Russell Brown shows how to create “faux HDR” from one image using Camera Raw/Lightroom.
• FDR (Full Dynamic Range) Tools have released an updated version of FDRCompressor, their tonemapping plugin for CS2, CS3 and CS4. The tool works on both HDR (32-bit) and individual JPEG and raw files. [Via Manfred Schömann]
• Planet Photoshop posts a reminder about Bridge CS4′s ability to auto-stack components of an HDR image, then have Photoshop batch-merge the files.