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What's New on Image Effects

28th March 2000

• Added new entry to the Techniques section - Shimmering Water and Text.
• Added another Technique - the World's Quickest Effect, Water Glare.
• Adjusted the What's New page - most recent update is now at the top of the page.
• Fixed some in-site links in the What's New page - people browsing the old features can still get to them now.

13th March 2000

Added a new entry to the the Techniques section - Shining Light by Kate Elliott.
Removed some of the clutter from the link bar at the bottom of each page.

10th February 2000

Many thanks to Hans Høje Christensen for his fan mail, and pointing out that there were some more broken links in the Techniques section. Magnify, Overlays, Stone Cobbles and Metal Text were all affected, but are now hopefully fixed.
I think I've finally caught all the problems now. My apologies to all of you out there for putting up such a shoddy piece of work, and not realising sooner.
Maybe now I can produce some new material.

23rd January 2000

Well, I am indebted to Kate even further, for having first view of the new site, and spotting all the bits which hadn't uploaded (and a few bits which had escaped the proof-reading). Hopefully fixed everything.

22nd January 2000, 2:30am

Right. I'm calling it complete for now. The site has finally gone live. Any problems, let me know.

21th January 2000

The site is nearing completion. I've finished adding stuff, just tweaking things now. Here are the changes since March 1999:

• Replaced the "Beginners" section with the "Photo Editing" section. All the text is rewritten. This covers what was in the beginners section and more, in much more detail! Well worth checking out. Covered is:
  

  Basic

  Requirements for image processing.
  Obtaining images.
  Resolution: pixels, dots per inch (dpi), and colour depth.
  Saving pictures - file formats explained.

  Intermediate

  What is moire? (Or: why do my scans have a chequered pattern, and how do I get rid of it?)
  Improving picture contrast and brightness (Tone Balance and Percentages).
  Correcting picture colours.
  Improving blurred pictures.

  Advanced

  Removing parts of a picture: the Clone tool.

• Added the reader survey. I've had this kicking about for a while now, but I've finally brought it into line with the rest of the site, and added it in.
• Added an optional frames based interface. Click the links to activate it. It isn't very special, but should make it slightly faster to jump around the site for those people who like these sort of things.
• Renamed the "Examples" section "Gallery".
• New logos. (Again.)
• New pseudo-domain name.
• Many minor text improvements here and there.
• Behind the scenes development techniques changed to allow for faster updates.

11th January 2000

Wow - is it that long? Almost one year since the site was destroyed at Fortune City, the next big update is almost complete. I apologise for the long delay in updating - small comfort, I know, but fate conspired against me. This development has been in progress for about six months now with many interruptions, but finally it is nearing completion (five pages left as I write). It may not look like a big change, but the process I use to create the page has undergone a big change. Also, I've been trying to refine all the pages slightly to increase usability. Okay, most of the changes are small and hard to see, but they needed doing.

The biggest change (apart from yet another new logo) is the new Editing Photos section, which has taken a surprising amount of work.

Sometime in March 1999

The current hosts for Image Effects, Fortune City.com, had a hard disk failure and destroyed the site in January. Alas, bad network links, poor performance from FC, and a dodgy FTP program conspired to stop me uploading the entire site until now.

29th October 1998

First update for a while, due to work getting in the way. The following changes have been made:

• Added the Magnifying Glass technique to the Techniques section.
• Added the Image Borders technique to the Techniques section. This is the first technique that I've created in the new, tidy layout, which should be faster to access too.
• Improved the layout of the Techniques section. The index and all the tutorials have been moved over to a new, tidy layout similar to that used for the Examples section. This means, the tutorials have small images, with links to the larger versions. This is more friendly for users with low-resolution displays, and should result in shorter download times, as well as making it easier to read and easier to find techniques that interest you. Note that not all tutorials have been converted - some which already used small images (such as the emboss tutorial) aren't worth converting.
• Added a guide to file types, in The Beginner's Guide. [Update: The filetypes guide can now be found in the Photo Editing section.
• Changed the Image Effects logo (again). Well, I like designing logos...

4th October 1998

Hooray! My computer is back up and running. I am now using a K6-2/350MHz, with 64Mb of RAM. To celebrate, started overhauling the layout of Image Effects.

28th September 1998

No updates recently because my home computer (which contains all my art software) died several days ago. The hard disks should be intact, but the motherboard or processor is very dead. I should have some more updates as and when I can source new components. Look forward to the magnifying glass technique among others...

26th August 1998

Recently upgraded to Picture Publisher 8, so more example pictures should be appearing as I test it out.

• Added Overlays to the Techniques section. This technique and its graphics were created by Kate Elliott. This tutorial also appears in Kate's examples section.
• Added the "Email Me" button to the front screen.
• Added the Show Stat access counter system to my page. (See the small icon on the bottom right of the front page.) The Show Stat web site is at http://www.showstat.com/.
• Finally added Image Effects to some more search engines instead of relying on links from other pages - currently, Lycos, Alta Vista, Hot Bot, Excite and Web Crawler.
• Updated the front page.

18th August 1998

• Add a new entry in the Techniques section - 3D text.
• Added a link to the MacArt online magazine web site in the links section.
• Added Image Effects to the Picture Publisher web ring.

7th August 1998

Added "House in the Sky" to the list of my images.

6th August 1998

• Renamed the site to Image Effects after much confusion with the Macromedia software called Dream Weaver.
• Added the "Casting Shadows" and "Embossed Shapes" tutorials.

20th July 1998

Dream Weaver: that's what's new!

Future plans

Despite having some plans, I seem to keep ending up adding techniques that come from nowhere, and making minor usability improvements. However, when I can put these distractions aside, here's what else I want to do:

Firstly, I want to add a section about colour spaces - RGB, CMYK, what the difference is, how to work with them, and the like.

Secondly, I want to tidy up the site a bit. The layout evolved slightly as I wrote the pages, and now it needs to be unified across all the pages - including the old ones! In particular, the techniques section needs modifying to make it more like the rest of the site (especially behind the scenes!). I'm making minor changes all the time, but it's got a long way to go.

After this, I have the continuing goal of adding more of what you want to see. But I need to know what that is! If you have any tutorials you would like to see, please email me! If you have anything that you would like to see on display in the gallery, please send it to me! (Please don't send large files by email without warning though.) And remember to stop by the survey form!

Remember, if anyone has any features or techniques they would like to see, send me an email at webmaster@imageeffects.8m.com , and I'll see what I can do.