"Hey, what the hell? 295 messages? I thought I cleared out all my messages yesterday... DA must be glitching out again..."

But no, it wasn't a DA glitch - it was a DA miracle! The wonderful, talented, and far-too-generous ^kkart gave me a DD for my piece, Halo =] Thank you, John!

I'm making this journal to send a mass "thank you" to everyone who has commented and fav'ed. I will never be able to personally thank every individual but I don't want to seem ungrateful so I thought I'd do it here.

So THANK YOU EVERYONE!!!!!

Man, what a way to start the day... =]

Hey Deviants,

In the last week alone, I have had 8 cases of stolen artwork reported to me. Art theft is way lame, and very unnerving when it happens to us.

My friend, *Aimelle, told me about this page:
[link]

And my friend, ~lmapii, directed me to some stolen works on photobucket via this article:
[link]

I encourage you guys to go to flickr and photobucket and type your deviantart username in the searchbar to check to see if any of your work has been stolen. If it has, crack down! Copyright laws may be unpopular, but it doesn't mean they're not there.

*UPDATE* I just found 5 more stolen pieces! I just went and deleted my carbonmade and my dA stock account in an effort to narrow down the scope of work I have on the internet and therefore better monitor my stuff. It sucks that it has come to this. I even had to delete the daily deviation I got on my sucker stock Bastards.

Hey everyone!

The *Care-Club needs your help! They're stocking up on awesome prizes to give away for their New Beginnings contest and they need more participants! If you're not already a member, join and submit an entry ASAP! You have nothing to lose, and everything to gain! The prizes range from year-long subscriptions to 3-month subsciptions, journal features to heart plushies! Look!



So cute! Here are the details for the contest:

Contest Theme:
As stated earlier the theme of the contest is “New Beginnings” and I think it’s pretty straight forward and self-explanatory. You are free to use whatever medium you wish to work on the entry, including poetry and literature.

Rules:

ONLY Members of Care-Club can participate in the contest

The entry has to be a completely new deviation made SPECIFICALLY for the contest and it should not be entered into any other contest being conducted in DA until our contest is over.
Contest entries should not be submitted to the Care-Club gallery.

Mature content, to some extent, is acceptable but no full frontal nudity, blood or gore. The Club Contest Admin reserves the right to decide whether the deviation meets the specifications.

Only 1 submission per deviant will be entered into the contest but you are free to submit up to three deviations for our consideration. In such cases the Contests Admin will decide which one is best among the submissions sent in by the deviant and enter it into the contest. By submitting more than one entry you are giving permission to the Gallery Admin to choose.

Send your entry via NOTE with the subject NEW BEGINNINGS CONTEST

Any type of art is acceptable.

The description of the deviation in YOUR gallery should include the following text: "This is my entry for *Care-Club ‘New Beginnings’ contest."

CLOSING DATE: 24th January 2008

: Prizes
1st Prize
* 1 Year Subscription by *DAnnsCreations
* 1 Month subscription by *Azmyst
* A Heart Plushie from *damaskangel
* Journal Feature at *Care-Club
* Journal Feature at =Lazulyte
* Journal Feature at =DruidWu
* Journal Feature at =Amersill
* Journal Feature at *Doublecrash
* Journal Feature at =Meyra
* Journal Feature at *TheeLit
* Club recognition

2nd Prize
* 6 Months Subscription by *DAnnsCreations
* Journal Feature at *Care-Club
* Journal Feature at =Lazulyte
* Journal Feature at =DruidWu
* Journal Feature at =Amersill
* Club recognition

3rd Prize
* 3 Months Subscription by *DAnnsCreations
* Journal Feature at *Care-Club
* Club recognition

Hey Deviants!

I recently came across two REALLY useful tips for editing and printing your digital photos, graphics, and scanned images. Be excited, because I'm going to share them with you.

My buddy, Mr. Sears, has recently posted a journal over on RedBubble preaching the wonders of a Photoshop plug-in called Genuine Fractals 5. The program claims to enlarge digital images 1000% with no loss of detail! Pretty freakin' sweet if true! I can't count how many times I've gone to print an image from my old archives and been unable to make it a decent size because of low resolution. If Genuine Fractals does what it claims to, that problem will be solved forever!

A free trial version is available, but unfortunately it will watermark your enlarged images. You can buy the full version for $160, but I opted to download it for $0 using bit torrent. I plan to test it out tonight.

Another awesome program (which I use on an almost daily basis) is Neat Image. I heard about it months ago from the talented Mr. Openshaw, a very well-known Chicago photographer with whom I was privileged enough to have a brief, informal photo shoot. Another Photoshop plug-in, Neat Image is the industry standard in noise-reduction software. It works brilliantly. It's perfect for cleaning up photos that were taken at a high ISO or in dim light. Additionally, it gives a very professional, airbrushed look to portraits without going through the hassle of actually airbrushing them. Example

Neat Image is similarly pricey, but can also be downloaded for free using bit torrent. If you want to do it the legal way, though, you can go to their website and download a free, crippled version that will only allow you to fix images 1024px and smaller. It's really worth having, either way. I strongly recommend getting it.



I hope you guys will have a chance to check out these awesome programs, and I hope you'll get as much use out of them as I plan to =]



UPDATE! I played around in Genuine Fractals and it is amazing! There's a lot of adjustments you can make that will allow you to get everything just right, so it might be a little overwhelming for some. I recommend finding a good tutorial to get you started. Also, it is only compatible with CS2 and up.