Site shift

This site won't be updated anymore. I'm moving my blog to here.

Ninjaman on YouTube

I could do that...

Weird and wonderful pics on Google Earth

Some of these images made me scratch my head. There's some really cool pics here, but I'm sure some of them are just the guys at Google having a little fun...

A fishy post...

How good is this tank!!??

The fish can swim between tanks along the acrylic tubes. Apart from being nearly impossible to clean and running the risk of flooding your house if the tube lost pressurization, it's really neat!

Color scales in Photoshop

You're editing your blog template and you've got one really good color that you want to use. Great, but how do you select other colors to look like they belong?
This is the way that I go about creating a scaled color palette that tends to work with any initial color.

I like to start with my darkest color, but this isn't a necessity. But seeing I'm writing this tute, here's my darkest color:




But what matches this? What I like to do is fill my Photoshop background with this color (I've used #311A46). Then, on a new layer, make a decent sized selection and fill with white. Yep. White. It should look like this:




Now, here's the trick. In the Layers palette, change the opacity of this white layer back to about 33%. You can use a lower percentage, but I find that about 30-40% gives a good contrast between colors. Too higher percentage and you can only make 3 or 4 colors. By using 33% I find I can get a good spread of about 6 colors.




Now, make a copy of this white layer, and move it back a little so that it still overlaps the original white layer. You'll end up with something like this:




Continue this process, moving the new layer to overlap all previous layers. I try to get 5 or 6 levels of color (ie, 4 or 5 white layers plus the original) so I can get a good few layers in my blog template. This is the full 6 levels that I got from my initial color:




For an idea of how this color scheme looks, I've applied these colors to my site and this is the result.
You can use the same technique to make your base color darker by using a black or gray overlay. The downside of doing this is your colors tend to look quite dark after just one or two overlays. I usually lower the opacity to about 20% if making the layer darker.