Slashdot Mirror
Fun With Transparent Screen Backgrounds
herberts writes "Looks like the amusement factor of 'transparent' screen background is getting bigger and bigger. The french Mac fan site Mac Bidouille opened up a dedicated part of their web site where fans can post shots of their transparent backgrounds." Other great transparent background shots can be found at Flickr.
Some people have entirely too much time on their hands.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
But also very transient- move the computer, or just look at it from another angle, and the effect is destroyed.
And it has to be said: These people have way too much time on their hands!
Give a man fire, and you warm him for the night. Set a man on fire, and you warm him for the rest of his life.
It looks like these are all staged. They look pretty cool but I'd be a damn site more impressed if if could be done "live" with a webcam behind the monitor... :-)
These look extremely good when you set them up and then snap the result BUT they do not look any good at all or convincing when you try it in real life. I know because I'm so sad I tried it on Friday when this story first came out on gizmodo.com or engadget.com (always get those mixed up). If you really want to have a go remember:
1) You really need to use a laptop because shifting a CRT monitor or even an LCD panel is tough, flicking it down is easy.
2) Try to match the resolution of the camera to the screen size otherwise you'll have to stretch it to get it to fit right. Even then it won't look right because it only looks right from one position.
3) Get a app that lets you tint and alter the gamma of the photos. My digital camera's white balance just didn't create the same yucky yellow tint that my office strip lights have. Couldn't match it at all.
4) Admit that honestly, if what's behind your PC monitor is a dusty cube wall it's probably not worth looking at anyway, and no, you won't fool anyone.
Which really sucks for those of us in other timezones who have to work on weekends (~5pm Sunday here). Soo bored.
On the flicr site every page states that it's not a photoshop trick. And if you don't believe that look at the images closely, you can see that the colour is slightly off because of the LCDs.
Any idiot can merge two layers together in Photoshop. The whole point of these images is the work it takes to get the image really on the screen to match as closely as possible to the background...
Find a few that make you suspcious, and I'm sure a lot of people will point out why they were not done in PS.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
But this gives me an idea: why doesn't somebody photoshop a picture of himself, with a transparent teletubby-style screen on his belly. Oh, and the camera would be positioned rather high, looking down....
It looks like a modern version of trompe l'oeil, without all the pesky work involved in learning how to paint.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
Solution: embed a webcam in the cover of the laptop and then have it auto update to the desktop background :)
Exactly. It would take less than five minutes to fake one of these. And I'd do it myself as a demo except that it's lame...
-Put camera on tripod
-Take picture without computer in frame
-Put computer in place with the desktop set to a solid green color
-Load Photoshop and layer the images together with the "computer in place" image on top
-Cut out the screen's solid green so the image underneath shows through
-Adjust the image behind to be slightly offset and mess up the coloring a bit to fool people who fall for stuff like that
-Flatten and enjoy
For the especially dedicated, you could take a screengrab of the mac desktop and load that rather than removing the green color so you get a better image.
N.
"Nothing strengthens authority so much as silence." - Charles de Gaulle
..the reason that we haven't yet come up with a cure for AIDS or cancer is that all of our scientific minds are engaged in activities that far more pressing, such as transparent backgrounds. Just joking, this sh*t's important.
This kind of reminds me of that HP photo/camera commercial, where that fellow snags frames out of the air, capturing screen shots from live motion in the foreground and background with each one he grabs.
What the hell does "decadence" have to do with the start of World War I? I always thought World War I was the result German nationalism leading up to the period. Heck...Germany's war plans had been written by Bismark in the 19th century.
Unless, by "Great War", you were referring to some sort of cultural revolution.
tasks(723) drafts(105) languages(484) examples(29106)