REM State

Overview

One of the first things I wanted to take a stab at with this site was making a little logo image. Since the site’s name is REM state, a closed eye immediately came to mind as an appropriate symbol.

Creating the Logo

Since I have two perfectly functioning eyes (with corresponding eyelids), along with a digital camera, acquiring the image was fairly straightforward. The process went something like this:

1. Turn off all the lights, except for one lamp
2. Put my camera in full-manual mode
3. Zoom the camera all the way in
4. Manually focus the camera to 0 (right in front of the lens)
5. Stick my hand under the light about where my face will be
6. Move the camera so my hand is in perfect focus
7. Have the camera meter my hand
8. Adjust shutter speed & f-stop until the meter indicates good exposure
9. Move my face under the lamp to take the place of my hand
10. Take lots of shots

An additional step—setting the white balance—was omitted, because I was using a full-spectrum lamp. If you plan on using a light source with a tint, and you don’t want the tint to show up, you’ll need to do something about the white balance. My camera handles white balance semi-automatically; if yours doesn’t, you’ll have to figure out how to do it in post-processing.

Processing the Images

Once the pictures were shot, I pulled them off the camera and onto my computer. Here, I opened them all up in an image viewer, and picked out the one I thought looked best. I then opened that picture up with the Gimp, and proceeded to do the following:

1. Crop out just the section I wanted
2. Set the color mode to grayscale
3. Set the color mode back to color
4. Use the colorize dialog to duo-tone the picture
5. Scale the picture down to a reasonable size
6. Save (over the original—d’oh!)

The fact that the duo-tone color matched with my palette was a total fluke. Naturally, if I were to do this again, I would have used the palette to determine what color to use. The idea for making the picture duo-tone came from a duotone article on the BioRust site.

Generating the Favicon

The favicon was generated directly from the web image. This process was a snap, and consisted of cropping the image tighter, and then scaling it down. Note, however, that I had to be mindful of how I cropped: the final image needed to have a 1:1 ratio between width and height. Since the eye is longer than it is wide, I couldn’t crop the height at all—I could only trim the width to try and get as close to a 1:1 aspect ratio as possible. Once the cropping was done, I resized the image to 16×16 pixels, and saved it in the appropriate format.