Archive for April 2010

 
 

Rockstar and Dell Swarm win at Asia Interactive Awards 2009

Our Intel Tomorrow Stars, Today wins greater recognition with a Bronze Award for Best Breakthrough Site and Most Outrageous / Humorous Online Ad or Campaign.

Meanwhile, the buzz from Dell Swarm continues, as we picked up a Bronze Award for Best Social Media Campaign at Asia Interactive Awards 2009.

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Bronze Award

April 26th, 2010 | Design & Discoveries, General | 0 Comments

Fixing the “Save for Web” color shift in photoshop

Another great tip floating around the office mail.

Not sure if anyone else has noticed this problem in photoshop, but whenever I save for web, there is a color shift resulting in the end file to be slightly brighter than the colors in my PSD. This can be problematic especially when creating slices with specific color hex codes during production… there is always the possibility of your slices’ coloration being slightly different from your original PSD (had this a lot with dell swarm, where the greys refused to match up in the final site).

The Fix

After a bit of digging around, I found the solution to this here: It seems to have fixed the problem. I recommend designers to make this setting correction now if they haven’t already done so… it will solve potential problems during production in the future. I’ll even copy and paste the steps here for easier reference:

Step 1: Color Profiles

Color profiles define how Photoshop interprets the raw color data in your files. That’s right: That means they change how you see the colors. This kind of precision is great for photography and print design, but it’s got to go if we’re making a website. With no images open, go to Edit / Color Settings. We’re going to essentially turn off all this profile nonsense by changing the top drop-down to Monitor Color. Let’s uncheck “Ask When Opening” while we’re at it….from now on, when you open an image that has a color profile, Photoshop will give you a brief heads-up that we’re tossing it out.

Step 2: Proof Setup

Now, let’s go up to View / Proof Setup / Monitor RGB. This is to make sure Photoshop won’t be showing you skewed colors on your nice new profile-less images. A note, though: If you’re on a Mac/PC and want to see how an image is going to look on the other’s default gamma setting, you can come back here and test using “Windows RGB” or “Macintosh RGB.” Just remember to switch it back, or you could accidentally be designing in (shudder) PC mode.

Step 3:

After all this hard work, Photoshop still wants to sneak color profiles into your images. Most web browsers ignore them, but new Safari and Firefox builds DON’T, and IE can be set to work with them too. This can result in the weirdest cross-browser headache yet, so we need to make sure the colors we save out are sans profile. Thankfully, it’s an easy fix: Open up any image on your machine and File / Save For Web. Next to the Preset option, there’s a sneaky little arrow…click it and uncheck “Convert to sRGB.” (Note: From what I can tell, this is only the default setting in CS3)

And that’s it! Your green pear will now stop looking like a muddy pear every time you save for web.

April 25th, 2010 | Design & Discoveries, Tech Talk | 0 Comments

Australian shoot

On location in Australia. For a new program all to be revealed in June/July. This is a two day film shoot in Brisbane for a new innovative online campaign. It is a great mix of sophisticated film work and innovative online/social integration.

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Of course there was time to bond with cast and crew, and what better way than footy. Seems like the whole country is football mad.
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April 25th, 2010 | Client Work | 0 Comments

National Heritage Board goes 360 VR

The National Heritage Board has started to release the online versions of the exhibitions they curate here in Singapore.

These are photographed 360 degree navigatable microsites which can be used for reference as a long term asset. They are an invaluable, and cost effective way, to ensure that these highly educational exhibitions extend their life indefinitely. You can see first exhibition using this new approach, Land of the Morning: The Philippines and its People, at: http://www.nhb.gov.sg/eo/acm/lotm/

They were shot using a Canon 5DmkII with a wide angle zoom lens tethered to a Macbook Pro for an instant view of the shot taken. Everything was mounted on a movable tripod to move around quickly.

Each shot is bracketed (3 exposures) to create a HDR (high dynamic range) shot for post production exposure adjustment flexibility.

The shots are combined and stitched together using Autodesk Stitcher to create a HDR panoramic 360 VR (virtual reality) shot.

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It is a nice start to a pretty interesting initiative.

April 21st, 2010 | Uncategorized | 0 Comments

TUS interviewed at Google Analytics Master Class

Just for fun – see some of our staff at this Google event (from 37 sec onwards)


Google Analytics master Class

April 2nd, 2010 | General | 0 Comments