Wow, we only had BTT two times this week! Thursday was the Ontario Science Centre trip, and on Friday it was a Day 2. Speaking of the Science Centre trip, it was awesome!! We had two labs: one about chemistry (stuff blew up and we got to see liquid light) and electricty (we learned about it's history and saw electricty before our own eyes). We also watched an Imax film called Roving Mars, which was about two rovers (Spirit and Opportunity) who landed on the surface of Mars. These two rovers confirmed that Mars did have liquid water sometime in it's past, which raises the chance of their being life on it (be it present or past).

For the next week or so in BTT, we'll be working on creating our own pictures using Photoshop - from scratch! Mr.Case showed us how to replicate and merge layers so that even though he created a single brick, he managed to make a complete brick wall. The art presumably has to be related to something that is related to us - an important sign or something that depicts the creator's own personality, for example.

The following is a collective of notes that I took today at BTT class: When you open a New document, you have to choose and decide what it is for (are you putting it on the internet, printing, etc), thus choosing what resolution and dimensions it will have. The Rectangular Marquee Tool helps you select things with rectangular shapes. Elliptical Marquee Tool is very similar to the rectangular one, only it selects things with a circle shape. If you want a perfect circle or square to select something, press Ctrl+D. Always work on a duplicate layer, unless you want your original picture/work to get ruined if you make a mistake (it's also more convienient to work with multiple layers). There are shortcuts for each tool, for example press Ctrl+M for the Marquee Tool. The Move Tool helps move things around. The Lasso Tool helps you select things. The Feather Tool helps soften the selected edges. The Magic Wand Tool has tolerance levels froms 0 to 255. The tolerance levels choose the closest pixels to your selected number (10, 20, 100, etc). However if you select 255 as the tolerance level, then your WHOLE document will change. Red eyes are caused when light from a flash goes into the person's eyes and then reflects right back (a red reflection is made thanks to the retina). Contiguous means touching, and it only chooses the colors that are within the chosen levels AND those that are touching. The Crop Tool helps you crop parts of a picture and you can choose the width, length, and resolution of what you cropped will become right there. When you blow stuff up (make it big), it becomes fuzzy because information is absent. The Text Tool (you can write vertical or horizontal) allows you to put words onto your document, A gradient is a blend of 2 colors, and you can choose where the gradient starts and it's direction. You can even make the gradient opaque or transparent. The Shape Tool allows you to input shapes. The Airbrush Tool has a soft edge, and it is similar to spraypainting. The background Eraser erases the background layer of a work. The Compressionist Brush can be used to do funky stuff. The Blur Tool blurs parts of your picture. The Sharpening Tool increases the edges and contrasts betweeb a picture. Be careful not to overdo the Sharperning Tool because then your picture will have extreme, whitish contrasts and it will not look professional at all. The Sponge Tool softens and blends the picture like a wet sponge. The Smudge Tool smudges parts of a picture. The Red Eye Tool adjusts the levels of the red in your eye, and the computer tries to replace the red with existing colors from the eye. The Burn Tool subtly darkens an image. The Dodge Tool subtly lightens an image. The Clone and Stamp Tool clones a selected area of your picture. Press the Alt key down, click on where you would like to clone (the stamp appears), and then click on where you would like the cloned area to appear. You can change your paintbrush so that the brush sizes vary to help you with this. The Eyedropper Tool goes in and selects color from your picture (this is called color sampling). The Hand Tool is used to move things around. The Pattern Tool is similar to the Clone and Stamp Tool, only it creates patterns.

I really have to catch up on my blogging! Anyway, we've started a new unit on Photoshop during the last couple of classes. The following is just a collective of notes and information: DPI stands for Dots Per Inch. The most common size for photographs is 4 inches by six inches. A megapixel is a million pixels. The Additive and Subtractive theory is about the three main colors of light>RGB (red, green, and blue) and the four colors used in ink>CMYK (cyan, magenta, yellow, and black which is also know as K). In computer resoultion, we use 300 DPI but when we put it on the interent it has to be 72 DPI. The less DPI a picture has, the less space it will take on your computer;less information. You could use large amounts of DPI if you were to scan something, or if you were a professional photographer. Once something is compressed, it will lose information and that information can never be regained. In fact, when you try to recover the information on Photoshop the picture will become blurry. JPEG is bad for professional photograpphers, because every time you change that file it will lose informatiom; thereby gaining the title of being a "lossy" file. If a file never loses information, then it is considered "lost-less". Examples of "lost-less" files would include PSD, TIF (Tagged Image Formats), and Bitmap (BMP) files. An average person uses only 6-8 megapixels, and a 24 megapixel camera would therefor be useless. Camera phones are bad because even if they have a lot of megapixels, their senses are just too small to capture enough light and the picture properly (gaining you a lower quality).

Woah! I need to cahc up on my blogging! Anyway, today was supposed to be the BTT test, but I had the math contest. That's why me and a handful of other kids will have to do the test tomorrow. The only problem is that this test will be HARDER!! I'm already pretty fair with the Microsoft Word part of the test, but I need to work on my legal podcasting stuff. That's why I think I'll create a page about all of the legal podcasting basics right now.

Hey it's a long, long weekend! Thursday was activity day, so I went to the Nascar Racing Track; if I had to summarize it in one word it would be "superb"! On Friday it was a PA day, and on Monday it is Family Day! That gives me plenty of time to study for the BTT test this upcoming Wednesday. Me and John also recorded our seventh episode of The Moh Joh Show: in this podcast we reviewed the book Star Wars The Force Unleashed. I'm actualy in the process of uploading the edited version, with music, onto the wiki now. I can't believe that we have actually made a podcast for every two weeks!! I hope you all have a rocking long, long weekend!!!

Whew! It seems that the BTT test is postponed! I think that it has moved over to NEXT Wednesday, which would be the 18th. I have also chosen the book that we will review for the next episode of The Moh Joh Show: Star Wars The Force Unleashed!

Lastt BTT class, we got a final work period for making pages about the MS Word Book and adding those tutorials to the Woodbine Wiki. We added the tutorials to the Woodbine Wiki to help us study for the test on Wednesday. I made a page on the menubar Edit Basic Functions that class, and I already had a tutorial up on the wiki about the WordArt Toolbar. That makes 4 tutorials for the MS Word Guide, and 1 up for the Wiki!!!

Today in BTT01, we learned a lot of important things! First of all, there will be a test next Wednesday about Microsoft Word and Legal Rights (podcasting). A pixel is a very small blot on the screen short for Picture Element. We learned that there are different colors used for ink (cyan, magenta, and yellow), then the colors used for light or on the computer screen (red, green, blue). These six colors complement each other. For example you could get cyan by mixing green and blue together, and you could get blye by mixing cyan and magenta together. The more colors you have in light, the lighter your picture gets while the more colors you have in ink the darker your picture gets. Each color in light (red, green, and blue) can have 256 different shades or tones. So if you multiply 256 by 256 by 256, you would get around 16.7 million different color combinations! That means that each pixel has a piece of red, green, or blue in it (or none if you want a perfect color). If you wanted a perfect color, you would type in 255 for the color you wanted (because 0 is a level too) and then 0 for the other two. It is also good to note that if you put 0 for all three of your colors, you will get black. If you put 255 for all of your colors, then you will get white. If you have any equal levels in between (such as 78 for all three colors), then you will get a shade of gray. Also, colors are measured in the hexadecimal or Base 16 system. The values for this system are as follows: 1, 16, 256, 65536, etc. Since the computer would get confused if you were to write 10 in this sytem, we use the letters A-F to represent the numbers 10-15. So A stand fors 10, B stands for 11, C stands for 12, D stands for 13, E stands for 14, and F stands for 15. There is no need to have any other numbers after F, because then it becomes 16 again. The hexadecimal color is used as a code (for example 3F4B8E) for a certain color, and you can actually see the code in Adobe PhotoShop. Speaking of Adobe Photoshop, we learned how to use a neat function called the Eyedropper. This function turns your cursor into an eyedropper, from which you can see the colors used in a picture and see it's actual coding. This would be really neat to try on a scanned picture. Whew! That was a long post-Mohammad Signing Out.

Today I handed in my Basic File functions into the BTT tutorials. This tutorial is basicaly about all of the simple features and functions of File. I'm currently working on one for Basic Edit functions.

Today I was supposed to go to the library in the morning or at lunch to comlete my Mail Merge Letter. Unfortunately, I woke up a little late so I couldn't go to he library in the morning and I had student council at lunch. I also had to pick up my little sister after school. However I finished it right now at home, because I forgot that one of our computers actually had Microsoft Word 2003.

Today in BTT, Mr.Case was not here and there was a supply teacher. Anyway, there were instructions on the Wiki to create a mail merge letter. I started off and created 10 entries, each with ten fields. Unfortunately, by the time I had a chance to start my letter the period was almost over. That means that I'll have to go in the morning and at lunch in the library to finish off my letter.

Wow, I can't believe that it is Febuary already! Anyways, on the wiki I uploaded the sixth episode of The Moh Joh Show, replied in some forums, and reated a page about the Word Art Toolbar. I think that I'll be getting around to creating a page about New Window and Arrange. Another cool idea popped into my head for our MS Word Tutorial Book (Getting To Know MS Word): what if I could create a page for all of the simple functions in each of the menubar functions? This way we wouldn't have to explain functions like Cut or Copy in their tutorials, but put the very, very basic functions into just one tutorial page.