Imagenomic’s Portraiture – An Auto-Tune for Portraits?

I’ve been playing with Imagenomic’s Portraiture 2.0 plugin for Photoshop. Forget masking, smoothing, tweaking portaits — Portraiture does it all. An Auto-Tune for portraiture? Maybe. It’s not going to turn you into Pascal Dangin. However, start with an image properly lit and posed, tidy up any serious blemishes with Photoshop’s various brushes and stamps, and Portraiture will take care of most of the subsequent masking, smoothing and tweaking, quickly and easily. Even its default settings do a pretty good job. Portraiture also supports Photoshop’s automation processing workflow for batch processing. And, as with Auto-Tune, you can also pull the sliders …

Documents with Tails: Blogjects

Evidently there’s a nice new ‘theory object’ neologism for the class of things of which Documents With Tails are members: blogjects. Thanks for Stephen for reminding me to read that paper.

Jack and FLAC

Have updated my music player to use the JACK low-latency realtime library for output, and replaced Mplayer with alsaplayer as the media player. Have also dropped the Meridian 518 and Yamaha decoder from the output chain, feeding audio straight into my Bryston via the music box’s onboard DACs. Given the hardware (and purpose of the box), there’s little benefit to be had from the low-latency features of JACK, but the realtime support helps keep the output smooth in the face of other stuff running on the box (CD ripping, for example). And something in the combination of the simplified signal …