Balls and Walnuts
more than you ever wanted to know
Friday Flickr Babes: Dragon Ladies.
From my sister, we have a nasty dragon lady:
Not bad. The fist is a nice touch. I guess I wouldn’t turn her away if she raked her nails down my neck, saying, “You make me crazy, baby. How ’bout I show you the sweetness of pain,” but if we saw each other in a bar, I wouldn’t be buying her any drinks.
From Flickr, however, we have a truly GREAT dragon lady. Dean, who has a thing about women’s backs, is gonna love this gal.
The dimples do it for me, as they do for Dean, too. Hey, Karen, take off your clothes so I can see if you have dimples! (She says she has dimples on her butt. I’ll take what dimples I can get.)
And I like the dragon, too — stylized, elegant; it highlights her back but does not detract from it. The page says she’s King Lizard’s property, but that’s okay. I’m the Spider Lady’s property.
One more dragon lady for ya.
If you’ve ever wanted to own a pet lizard, you could do no better than a bearded dragon (Pogona vitticeps). They’re the only lizards I know who seem to really enjoy contact with humans. Ours would come running to the front of the terrarium whenever I would enter the room. The “Hey, here’s Food Guy!” phenomenon, no doubt, but it brought a smile to my face anyway. Our current lizard is a water dragon, and she’s pretty cool, too. She lets me hand-feed her and she doesn’t mind being held. And, yes, if she’s hungry enough, she’ll come running when I open the cage.
But whatever you do, don’t get a green iguana. Oh, they’re nice enough if you handle them every day AND are fortunate enough to have one free of personality disorders. Too many iguanas become vile as they mature — and a vile iguana has many offensive attacks at his disposable. He can bite, scratch, whip you with his tail, and spray feces at you.
Which reminds me: only six weeks left as Chief of Staff! Yippee!
D.
The tattoo looks Photoshopped on.
It is. But it’s still cool. And that’s a beautiful back.
It’s been a feast this week.
I don’t understand how you guys can be so sure.
That’s a cool lizard.
I had a green iguana once – sweetest lizard ever. He was very calm and affectionate. His favorite food was peeled, seedless grapes. He got some sort of lizard ailment and died when I went on vacation. My aunt, who had been taking care of him, was heartbroken.
There are a couple of clues. The foremost is that it just doesn’t look like a tattoo would look if it were really part of her skin. See how the tone of her skin changes, the sheen? The tattoo is supposed to be under the skin, so it should share that quality, and it doesn’t. Someone with more skill can do that better: they overlay the second image and allow the layer underneath to show through. Whoever did this didn’t know how to do that, although they did a good job of matching the level of the overlay with the original.
The second thing is that the tattoo is sharper than the base image. There are people who know how match apparent sharpness between images, but I’m not one of them. This is one of the hardest things to get right when doing composite images. The best way to manage it is to make the changes with both images at maximum resolution and then soften it after. But this looks like a sharp image was laid over a fairly low-quality jpg (see the halos around her sides? Those are jpg compression artifacts).
Doesn’t alter the fact that I enjoy this image: the tones on her back are beautiful, particularly on her lower back and hips, and she, being a young woman, has that marvelous sinuous quality that young women have. The overlay is large and imposing: if it were a real tattoo, it would make a bold statement. I like the composite image a lot.
Sam: like any critter, there are good iguanas and there are bad iguanas. We had one good iguana (Pee Wee . . . hmm, I wonder if I’ve ever told the story of poor, poor Pee Wee?) and two vile iguanas. Last we saw of them, they were living it up in their very own room in Santa Monica. A fellow researcher adopted them from us.
Dean: I bow to your expertise. I wonder if there are any online courses in Photoshopping?
Dean: It does look like they did do an overlay and adjusted the opacity to let the underlying image show through, just not sufficiently. You can see the image is slightly darker where the shadows fall on the back, and slightly lighter on the brighter spots on the back. You’re right that the dragon image is sharper than the rest of the photo, but it does appear that they did add some blurring to it, but not enough to blend in with the skin.
Another clue is that the dragon image doesn’t quite conform to the shape of the skin. The dragon appears 2D in comparison to the back. Around the spine and the shoulder blades, it appears the dragon may be slightly distorted, but I think that is an optical illusion due to the shadows rather than any actual distortion effects having been applied to that layer.
Doug: There are probably online courses in Photoshop. If not, tutorials are generally easy to find. Just a couple weeks ago, I saw a tutorial on doing tattoos. I don’t think the person who did this image saw that tutorial. 😉