Old and grunge - by Adzla

Okay, last few blog I showed you on how to manipulate hue to your photo in order to change the mood and its appearance. I bet some of you might want to change your photo or images from fully colored to toned or monochrome picture/image that will look like old and aged also 'grunge'. Some might straight convert the picture/image into greyscale or shoot in black & white image direct from in-camera settings.



I'm gonna show you how to toned image and give 'grunge' like effect on your image. Assuming that you have installed Adobe Photoshop and have some basic tool knowledge. This will only take about 15 minutes to do.


We're gonna change this dull picture. So open up the file and study the composition, lighting and exposure through the histogram.


After knowing what to do, crop out to desired composition and make a duplicate layer it the original.


Create new empty layer and fill it with black solid color and goto filter-render-cloud.


Clouded layer. Don't worry. Its alway like that.


Now filter-blur-gaussion blur the cloud layer and set blending to Softlight with the opacity 26%


Create a gradient fill and set blending to Overlay.


We are going to toned the image with a solid color. Create solid fill and blend it to Color.


Create adjustment layer of Levels. Adjust levels so that details of the sky can be retained.


Switch to mask and brush as shown.


Duplicate layer below and apply unsharpmask. Filter-sharpen-unsharpmask. And change blending mode as shown.


On the current layer, use dodge and burn tool to balance exposure of the building as shown.


Now, this is the best part. Click on brush and use heavy scratch brush. Set it to maximum and with just a click of the brush, you now have a scratch look of the image. Your image will be landscape. Just rotate the layer 90 degree and adjust the blending to your liking.


Finish image

You can play with the layers of adjustments such as Gradient map, Solid, Levels and Curve. Just experiment with those layers and try different blending modes.






To get your heavy scratch brush for Photoshop, you can refer to this web site . Its a great photoshop tutorial plus with simple follow-thru examples.

Thank you for reading. Enjoy.

Credits & Reference:

The author for the web
www.fantasylabs.net

Nice Ass Turns Frown Upside Down (pix by jr & lola)

If I had to sum up teh tarik gatherings of online car forums in one word, it would be 'poyo'. This is based on my very brief fling with online car clubs, and is just my personal, very subjective, very generalized, opinion.

Fortunately in my case, I'm easy to please coz I'm a firm believer that a nice ass can almost make up for a wasted morning.


Went with Lola to the Honda Prelude 4th Gen Anniversary at Awan Besar on Sunday. Not much to shout about. While I know that these types of meetings are meant to be light-hearted, both of us couldn't stand much for the back-slapping camaraderie among the (closet homosexual?) participants gathered on that day. In short, it was kind of a dick fest.

While they were friendly, I couldnt squeeze out much useful info from them, which was the main reason why I attended.

With that out of the way, here are some pix Lola and I snapped for your viewing pleasure.





















And for perverts who have hungrily scrolled down to the bottom of the page (that means you Mamim) here's another bone(r) for you...

Recipe - Roro Chili Crabs - by Adzla

Last Sunday I cook crabs for breaking fast dinner. I don't know if you want to try it but I just want to share with you (blog readers).





Roro Chili Crabs
(For 6-12 person)

9 crab (cut into half you'll get 18 pcs. Also, detach the crab claw from its. body)
2 pcs shallot (1 for blend, 1 cut into dice)
5 pcs garlic (cleaned)
2 nos of 1 1/2" ginger (cleaned) - 1 for boiling, 1 to be blended
2-4 bird's eye chili (if you like it extra hot add more chili)
2 1/2 tbsp dried chili paste
200ml or about 3 tbsp oyster sauce
300ml or about 5 tbsp chili sauce
2 pinch of shrimp paste (if any)
30ml or 1 small bowl of tamarind juice
several slice of yellow and green capsicum and cut into small cubes
3 tbsp sweet soya souce
sugar to taste
salt to taste
ground paprika
1 1/2 teacup plain water

As usual, you have to cleanup those crabs. Remove top shell, cut the claws, trim some pointy fins and cut into halves so that the juices of the crab blend into the sauce. And also, to ensure that water that already inside the crabby is remove from them.

Once cleaned, you now have to boil the crab with 1 piece of 1 1/2" size ginger (cut into small pieces of course!). After about 5-15 minutes of boiling or when you see white bubbles forming, stop boiling and drain the crab stock. Let the crabs cool down. Keep only 1 bowl of the crab stock. When draining the water, you'll see bits of crab in it. Try to retain the bits and just drain the water. We'll use the crab stock with the bits later.

Make some tamarind juice. Blend ginger, garlic, bird's eye chili and shallot.

Saute the blended items. Put in chili paste, oyster sauce, chili sauce, shrimp paste and stir to mix the ingredients until fragrant.

Next is to add some crab flavor. Add the crab stock and pour in tamarind juice. Let it boil a while and stir. Add sweet soya sauce, sugar and salt to taste.

Put in the crabs and also the diced capsicums and shallot.

Add a portion of plain water. Begin to stir the mixure.

You'll have to always stir the mixture to ensure that all the crabs is coated with the sauce.

Close the wok and let it simmer for about 20 minutes. Occasionally check and stir the mixture.

At this stage, the crab is almost ready. The crab is ready when the sauce is not too light and not too thick. Sprinkle ground paprika and take the crab out.

Finish the crab with cut chilies and tomatoes. It's done.


End.