What I find myself really wanting for the comment sections is a tag features that lets me (and others too…) tag a poster with what I think is relevant to me interpreting their comments. A sort of reputation system that releives a little of the tax on my brain keeping all the names straight.

Hmmm, I’ve been looking for a new app development challenge…

http://www.classicalvalues.com/archives/2009/10/kudos_to_obama.html

In the comments:

Every single statement has an expiration date. Every one.
Phelps · October 19, 2009 11:16 PM

My response:

Phelps,

Yes. How true. How sad.

All he has to give is lies. How sad for him personally. He will never know love. Or even that for which he has traded love for: power.

I guess I am an old-timer here at BC as I do remember the Wretchard the Cat icon.

What used to be called “investigative Journalism.”

1) Claim to be a critic of the subject you are defending (“I’m not exactly Fairey’s biggest fan…I also have some notoriety as an Obama critic.”)

2) Make a claim to authority (“I know Photoshop at least as well as Fairey does”)

3) Back up your personal claim to authority with claims to higher authority (“One of my art teachers was Nancy Ohanian”)

4) Set up a straw man and call him names (“Only a dolt would impugn the talent that went into her insanely detailed cross-hatched works.”) Note here that Ohanian’s work is not under debate, Fairey’s is.

5) Throw out a misdirection ploy to try and get people talking about something else (“Incidentally, the fellow who took the Obama photograph has testified that he never assigned the rights to AP. If that is true, then AP has lied in court filings.”)

If the sheep don’t accept your argument or go after your red herring:

6) Double down on your specific claims (“You can’t make a new version of the Obama poster through a mechanical or automatic process.”)

7) Scream that anyone who disagrees with you has no right to speak and should STFU. (“UNLESS YOU CAN DRAW, SHUT UP ABOUT ART. DO NOT OPINE ABOUT HOW THE STUFF IS MADE. DO NOT OPINE ABOUT WHICH TECHNIQUES ARE FAIR AND WHICH ARE NOT. JUST SHUT UP. YOU DON’T KNOW WHAT THE HELL YOU ARE TALKING ABOUT. YOU DON’T HAVE ANY RIGHT TO AN OPINION. JUST SHUT UP!”)

All this followed by:

8 ) Dissapear when your fraud is uncovered by some guy sitting around in his pajamas. Or whatever Bogie and JFSanders were wearing.

Now, just because I was curious, I took a trip over to our loose cannon’s blog. I didn’t read in-depth, but did note he seems to be rather critical of the TeaParty movement and thinks it’s all Bush’s fault. Also appears to be an AGW “Beliefer” for what that’s worth.

LOL, elby.

Would that be because, on the internet, nobody knows if you’re a cat?

P.S. The semi-old-timers at BC will remember when Wretchard’s pic actually *was* a cartoon cat.

It’s a four-color poster, and once you get the hang of Fairey’s approach — from perimeter to center, the colors go from dark blue to red to light blue to buff (using a 50% opacity brush for the “between” shadings where the light blue transitions to buff) — you can start anticipating what needs to go where.

On the Obama picture that I linked to at 55, my first step was to use Channel Mixer to reduce the pic to approx 4 colors, then I used Hue-Saturation to desaturate further and Brightness-Contrast to sharpen the areas of highlight & shadow, and the edges in between. FWIW, what ended up being the buff-colored areas in the Fairey poster matched almost exactly one-to-one the locations of the “blown-out” highlights when I pushed the contrast in PS … right down to the tiny highlight on Obama’s left eyelid (left, as you look at him). IOW, the color reduction and contrast boosting I did in Photoshop gave me a “paint by numbers” map that allowed me to then fill in Fairey’s poster colors and end up with something pretty damn close to what Fairey did (which could have been even closer to identical with some edge cleanup and a mask layer to produce the blue horizonal lines).

And, yes, he appears to have rotated the image clockwise ever so slightly … there’s a shade less tilt to O’s head & his ears are more level. I didn’t bother to do this, but it can be done easily in PS.