New Avatar Image

I recently had the idea of a "high five" between De Li and myself, which I reasoned would be a relatively uncomplicated exercise to create, if perhaps a little time-consuming.

The result, shown at the right, involved my taking a self-shot with my camera's timer, posed to suit the image of De Li that I already had in mind (and which was what gave me the idea in the first place).

It then took me a little over an hour altogether to complete, as follows....

First, I needed to put a transparency mask around my own image, at which I am only reasonably good (mainly because of my poor eyesight), and it does take me some time to do.

I then scaled that image to suit, and positioned it carefully on top of the De Li scene, which comes from the closing sequence of Waybuloo series 2 and 3 (it's in an extra bit that was added for the later series). This was done in RISC OS Draw on the Iyonix computer.

After saving this file, so that I could tweak it later if needed, I grabbed the area of the composite image that I wanted, using RISC OS Paint, then converted the resultant straight bitmap "sprite" image to a JPEG in RISC OS's ChangeFSI (the Floyd-Steinberg Integer image processing algorithm in a neat package).

It's not perfect, but I think it works well, and is certainly good enough at the sizes it is displayed on Twitter and elsewhere.

The main problem was proportions. My hand is so much bigger than a Pipling's hand that I'd have had to make myself somewhat smaller than would be ideal. It does work, I think, helped by careful choice of camera angles and my stance, along with where De Li's eyes are looking. Yes, I'm further away from the camera, which is (I reasoned) why I'd appear smaller.

UPDATE: I have now overcome the proportions issue to a better extent by taking a separate copy of my hand, at one magnification, and the rest of me at another. It seems to work even better than the original, and looks about right now. I've now incorproated it into an updated version of this site's banner.

As always, I have kept the object-based original, so I can tweak it or even replace part(s) in future if desired; but the version here is a straight bitmap grab of the area I wanted, converted to a JPEG version.

I like doing this sort of thing, as it is good practice for me. I usually do it entirely with the programs that come with every RISC OS computer –  Draw, Paint and ChangeFSI, and those are the only three tools I used to create the final image here.

For the component parts, I also used the free Avalanche to display the De Li image (for grabbing) from my one and only Microsoft-based computer, and of course my Olympus digital SLR camera for the photo of me. An alternative to the Avalanche method would have been the frame save facility in PCI-TV, which I have along with a TV card in the Iyonix.