Fun With 1940s Colorizing

Sometimes the really fun projects sneak up on you by accident.  When I started work on this poster for North Coast Repertory Theatre  I knew that I was going to get to have some fun with the 1940s style. I’ve been enjoying playing around with the WWII era while working on the layout for the new Humboldt Fire website (lots of pin up girls) so I was looking forward to another chance to visit the decade.  But looking at posters from the time period, I realized they had more than just a specific layout. Playing around with Photoshop filters, I quickly determined that adjusting hue and contrast settings wasn’t going to be enough. I needed to pick up a new skill.

I looked around online and found a great tutorial on colorizing photos.  Of course it felt a bit silly making my own photos black and white only to add color back into them, but in the end it was an incredibly rewarding and very simple process (though a bit time consuming.)  Most people who look at the poster probably won’t notice, but on a subconscious level I like to think it will make a difference.

 

The technical stuff:

If you think you’d like to give it a try (and if you’re doing any work with 1940s design, I highly recommend it) a couple of tips that weren’t included in the tutorial: (1) the best way to get a nice skin tone is to just lower the cyan curve.  I played around with yellow and magenta for a while before I figured that one out. (2) I recommend saving your selection paths individually before converting them to adjustment layers. It makes it a lot easier to create new selection paths when you can just select a whole area and subtract selections that you have already saved without having to toggle between layers.

Hope you have as much fun as I did.  If you have any questions, feel free to shoot me an email at dave@davidhamiltondesign.com

The Most Ironic Indicator of Web Success

Don't you just love how much sense spam makes?

Junk mail. Yep, you heard me right.  If your inbox is filled with requests from Nigerian princesses and offers for cheap Viagra, your website is probably doing it’s job.

You see, unless you’ve entered your email address on a large number of phishing sites, the number one way that your address gets out to the scammers and the junk mail artists is by finding your address online. As my own web site climbed in Google page rank, the amount of spam that I receive per day jumped from around 12, to over 100.  Not only that but Blue Ox Millworks, my most successful site, gets over 500 junk mail per day caught in their spam filter.

How do I know it’s true? I’ve tested it.

Sometimes when creating a website I build an email address just to receive results from an online form. These addresses aren’t used on any other sites and are only posted on one page. All mail from these addresses are forwarded to another account. The fun fact? The higher the page rank of the site that they are posted on, the more spam gets forwarded my way.

So next time you get the email from the hopeful Russian bride who wants to send you photos, smile and thank your webmaster.