It will help if you know your way around Photoshop a bit and know where things are located. For this example I’ll be using Photoshop CS3. I know CS4 has been out for a while now, but I’m happy with CS3. It does what I need it to do.

This is the image I’ll be using. It has been resized quite a bit from its original size.

Once you’ve decided on the image you’re going to use for this tutorial, the first thing you want to do is create a duplicate layer. You can do that by going to your layers palette, right clicking on your background layer and choosing to duplicate it.

Now that you’ve duplicated your layer, the next thing you need to do is blur that layer. You could use a gaussian blur, but I like to use a lens blur. You can find the lens blur by clicking on Filter in your top menu and choosing Blur. Here are the setting I chose for my lens blur.

And this is what my image looks like after applying the lens blur. Obviously, as you can see, everything is a blur. Not exactly what we want just yet. I’d like to have the blue character in the foreground be in focus and the characters further off in the distance not be in focus. Easy enough.

In order to do this we need to create a vector mask on the layer of the image we just blurred. You do that by clicking the mask icon on the bottom of the layers pallette.

Now with your vector mask in place, you’re ready to give your image a little depth of field. Grab your gradient tool from your tools menu.

With the tool selected you’re going to drag a gradient out on your blurred layer. In my case, since I wanted the blue character to be in focus, I dragged the gradient to the right, away from him.

If you apply your gradient and don’t like the result, just undo it and try again until you get a result that makes you happy. Here’s how my image looked after applying the gradient.

That’s pretty much it! You now know how to fake depth of field in Photoshop. Pretty easy, eh? You can of course take it further and perhaps apply some color correction to your image, giving it even more character.

Recently a good friend of mine released his latest racing map on ForgeHub. The map is called Fail Sands International. While I’m not much of a map builder myself, I actually got a chance to get in there and help him out a bit with the building and testing process. Once it was complete, we decided it would be cool to put together a little video to officially present the map to the forging community.

One thing I often like to do with Wordpress blogs is have a list of related posts or articles somewhere after the conclusion of a post. It’s a great way to offer quick links your readers can click on and find similar content. I’ve tried a lot of different related posts plug-ins. Some have been quite nice, others not so much. I think I’ve finally found the one I’ll stick with from now on.

Over on my newest website, GrifballHUB, I’ve begun using Similarity. Similarity is a simple to implement plugin which allows you to show related content in three different ways, depending on your needs. You have the option of displaying related posts based on tags you use for articles, categories or a mixture of both. Whichever you choose, you’ll have a very nice and clean looking list of links. The following is how it looks on my GrifballHUB website.

If you’ve been searching around for a decent related posts plugin and have yet to find one that makes you happy, I highly recommend checking out Similarity. It does exactly what it’s supposed to do, and does it very well.

A couple weeks ago, a friend of mine told me about a new gaming service that would be played entirely online and streamed via your internet browser. At the time he couldn’t remember what it was called, so I wasn’t able to hop online to check out what the service was. Today I stumbled onto what I believe he was talking about.

OnLive is a gaming service which is slated to be released this Winter allowing you play current games, including those you’d see on consoles right from your browser, using a plug-in which streams the game from OnLive’s servers. There’s also an option to play the games on your television using a small set top device. Once set up, gamers would then have the option to rent or buy games, watch demos and more.

What makes OnLive so intriguing to me is the fact that you wouldn’t need a top of the line PC to play the games. Because they are streamed via a plug-in, it would basically be like streaming a high def video, except that it’s a game which you can play. The following video is a nearly hour long press conference which does a much better job of explaining OnLive.

The question is, will OnLive make console gaming obsolete? If you had the option to play the same games you normally would on your XBOX 360 or PS3 on your PC, would you? For me I think the biggest factor will be the cost per games. I guess we’ll have to wait until Winter though to find out those details. Regardless it’s certainly something to keep an eye on if you’re an avid gamer.

Check out the original short film first and then the trailer to the upcoming featured film. The music in the trailer, if you’re interested, is by Coheed and Cambria. The song is called “Welcome Home”.

When you finish watching that, here’s a great rehearsal of the same song also recorded in high def.

I created the site using the eGamer Wordpress theme available from Elegant Themes. I had to do a bit of tweaking here and there, but overall I couldn’t be happier with the theme. It’s really the perfect theme for this type of site.

So far the site is just over a month old, but already we’re receiving pretty positive feedback from the grifball community. If you have an interest in gaming and specifically Halo 3, you should really check out grifball. It’s great for people like me who pretty much suck with the more convential weapons in the game. Plus if you enjoy sports, it would be hard not to enjoy grifball.

About the video
Matt Harding spent 14 months traveling around the world to 42 difference countries, simply to dance with the locals. Seriously, how cool is that? With all the crap going on in this world right now, it’s nice when someone does something like this simply to bring a moment of joy and smiles to everyone’s face.

I’ve embedded the high def version of the video, so if you’re on a slower connection, you may need to wait a bit for the video to finish loading.

After doing a little searching on Google, I found my solution in PixDrop. PixDrop let’s you send free picture messages to any cell phone which uses the Verizon, Sprint or AT&T networks. Knowing that Net10 operates on the AT&T network, I decided to give it a try. Amazingly it actually worked! Now I have a shnazzy new wallpaper on my phone.

If you’re like me and have been looking for a way to send picture messages to either your cell phone or to those of friends or family inexpensively, check out PixDrop. You can’t beat the price.