Nikki Chau

Visit Pandora, Again!

Nikki Chau — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 23:19:22 +0000

I got some awesome feedback from my Design Instructor on my last Visit Pandora guide cover, and here’s the new and improved version.

What I did:

Drop shadows and beveled edges for framing and separating images.
Remove All CAPS or small caps … tough top read than upper and lower case.
Anti-alias the headermore
Decrease the leading between the head and sub head just a tad.
Add an Info source

Before Sunset

Nikki Chau — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 23:07:30 +0000

One of my favorite movies is Before Sunset. For one of the Photoshop exercises, I created an imaginary poster for this movie.

I wanted to show the two lead characters, in fact the only ones, in a silhouette-ish layer to convey the idea that they have been living in the shadow of their encounters 9 years earlier, and that they had missed an appointment with each other. There are also some emotions for them to sort through.

The movie takes place in Paris, hence the Seine river and the Eiffel Tower. I wanted to make the sky a dark blue as sunsetting sky would be, but blue for optimism, the idea of “blue sky ahead”. I wanted to make the movie title “Before Sunset” a part of the horizon, as the sun would be.

Kim Yu-Na, Figure Skating, and The Asian Pressure

Nikki Chau — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 21:58:21 +0000

Before I say anything, let me first clarify that I’m calling it the “Asian” pressure because 1) I’m Asian, and I’m writing from a personal experience, and 2) The people in the story are Asian. I’m well aware that it’s not just an Asian thing, so please feel free to insert_your_label_here.

As you probably already know, the female figure skating Olympics Gold medalist is Kim Yu-Na, from South Korea, and the Silver medalist is Mao Asada, from Japan. They are both gorgeous and talented young women at the lovely age of 19, full of aspiration, determination, skills and talent, and external pressure. Pressure, pressure, pressure.

Watching the Figure Skating event, I couldn’t stop thinking about the enormous weight and burden that these women carry on their shoulders from their country. When I heard about angry letters that Kim Yu-Na would get from her “fans” if she won 2nd place, a wave and anger and sadness washed over me. It felt all too familiar.

When Kim Yu-Na won, I was super happy for her, but then I thought of Mao Asada, and what reaction she will receive for “losing”. I’m reminded now of a funny thing a friend once told me, that his mom considers him a failure because he’s a Computer Scientist and not a Doctor.

When will we stop the blaming and shaming of people that we think *should* do what we want them to do and be where we want them to be? When will we accept things as they are? Is that even remotely a feasible concept?

A Yoga Room to Call My Own

Nikki Chau — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 08:44:50 +0000

Tonight’s lecture was on using Adobe Bridge as a Digital Asset Management tool, and one exercise was on the use of shadow and lighting.

I was to transform this room into anything I wanted:

Just another empty apartment room.

I thought, hey, why not my own Yoga space? And so, making it into my dream yoga room, I did.

My dream space

I used the view of the Olympic mountains and the Puget Sound as inspiration. Actually, the wallpaper might be a little too “girly” for my taste, but it looked really cool when I “put it on”. The teardrop lamps are sorta novel, so I experimented with that.

Tricks used:

Lots of Layering and Filtering
Clipping Masks
Drop Shadow
Vanishing Point Filter
Transforming

I thought the timing of this exercise was impeccable, because over at my Yoga Blog, I just wrote about something along the same line of working with lighting and shadows. Sometimes, “she moves in mysterious ways”…

Pandora Tourism Brochure

Nikki Chau — Sat, 27 Feb 2010 07:30:47 +0000

What if the Department of Tourism needed a Tourist brochure? Here’s something I thought would be fun to make to play around with Filters.

A Pandora Visitors Guide Brochure Cover

Filters used:

Unsharp mask
Craquelure
Water paper
Texturizer
Posterize
Cut-out
Glowing Edge

Images aren’t mine, I just cropped and filtered them. Thank you to all the artists for putting them out there so I can crop and photoshop to my heart’s content.

What are your thoughts? Would you visit?

Relief From Photoshop Addiction, an Advertisement

Nikki Chau — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 04:59:02 +0000

I worked on this ad today, using basic typography tricks including Type Masking, Drop Shadowing, and Warping.

Ask your doctor today. Drugs for Facebook and Twitter forthcoming.

Photoshop for Fun and Profit

Nikki Chau — Tue, 23 Feb 2010 22:30:24 +0000

I’ve been playing/working with layers, and here’s a sample.

A lodge cabin before surgery

And… here’s what the post-surgery Heidi Montag version looks like:

If you can landscape in real life, there's always Photoshop

Some things I did:

Using some advanced selection methods like Color Range, Quick Mask, and Extract Filter.
Using Alpha Channel Mask for layering.
Using Transform and Opacity Levels to modify text and 3D effect.

What’s your feedback for me to improve on?

Photoshop is Ruining my Life!

Nikki Chau — Sat, 23 Jan 2010 22:34:55 +0000

This is what a friend of my told me when we were in college. He was in the Art School studying Visual Design, and he said that he can’t look at Maxim or any of those skin magazines the same way anymore. “All I see is Photoshop retouching!”, he’d exclaim.

And oh, yes, I do know what he means.

Here’s before

A small child with a rock, and a couple scratches

Here’s after a couple strokes of the healing brush:

Okay, now there's a face a mother could love, right?

I used a couple things to retouch the image:
Clone Stamp, Healing Brush, Dodge, Patch, and Burn tools.

Control-Alt-Delete

Nikki Chau — Mon, 04 Jan 2010 08:12:31 +0000

I, like… oh, 60, 70, 80% of the world, loved Avatar and plan on using what’s left of our 401k to see it a couple more times in theater.

Sure, there are crappy dialogs (”You’re not in Kansas anymore”, wow, never heard *that* before), predictable plot (sure, you can think of it as Pocahontas or Dances with Wolves in space, or even Lawrence of Arabia, if you want to), and typical James Cameron material (if you play the Avatar theme song “I See You” a couple times, god-awful memories of “My Heart Will Go On” will resurface and make you cry).

Okay, that’s all I want to say about Avatar for now.

Something that made me go “whoa” tonight was something I read on Wikipedia about Sam Worthington.

When he was around 30 years old, he took a look at himself in a mirror and realized that he did not approve of his life. This caused him to sell most of his possessions, and he ended up with around $2,000 to his name. He then purchased a car with the money and lived in it for a period of time.

He analogously equated his actions to hitting Control-Alt-Delete on a computer. He subsequently got a place to live following his successful audition and signing to the Avatar film project.

Whoa.

The Pursuit of Happiness

Nikki Chau — Sun, 20 Dec 2009 10:11:39 +0000

Throughout this past week and a couple before that, I have been randomly running into the concept of “happiness” everywhere I looked. My guess is, because it’s the end of the year and also the end of what TIME Magazine called The Decade from Hell (geez, sensational much?), a whole lot of us are reflecting more than usual, and movies like Up in the Air have got us asking, “What am I doing with my life?”, and “What is it all for?”

On Friday, I read the article This is the Greatest Good by Richard Layard, author of Happiness: Lessons from a New Science, who suggests:

So it is time to reassert the noble philosophy of the Enlightenment. In this view, every human being wants to be happy, and everybody counts equally. It follows that progress is measured by the overall scale of human happiness and misery. And the right action is the one that produces the greatest happiness in the world and (especially) the least misery. I can think of no nobler ideal.

Now, I won’t go into what exactly constitute happiness, because that in itself is a giant black hole, and it’s the crux of the argument that what Richard Layard proposes is not practical, nor desired, as this dude said in the counter-essay: The pursuit of happiness is a fool’s errand.

For one thing, pain too will be part of any rich human life as, say, when people fall in love. For another, pleasure comes in all sorts of different guises that can no more be compared than can the joy of reading a book with the buzz of dancing until dawn. Today’s utilitarians believe they have overcome this difficulty, since we can now observe people in scanners: pleasure centres light up in the brain, producing an apparently objective measure.

Only it isn’t. The problem is that there is no way to read a brain directly: no grey fold or ganglion is pre-labelled “happiness”. – Mark Vernon

I very much see where these two guys are coming from. Today my friend Andy briefly talked about why we haven’t been out and about partying as much like we used to, and I mentioned what my senior yoga teacher Judith Lasater said in an interview:

There’s a difference between fun and enjoyment. Fun is something I might want to do to get away from my life and enjoyment is something I can bring into my life. With fun, I’m thinking of trying to escape for the moment. Enjoyment is something that brings me into my life. It is the attitude I have within my life.

It’s not a stretch to say that we are all pursuing something called happiness. We all want to have fun, to enjoy life, to be happy. Why then, does happiness seem so elusive? I have a couple theories, but I want to hear from you. What do you think? What’s your definition of happiness? And according to that, are you happy?

You don't want to see my unhappy face, trust me.