Month: February 2005

Color tones

Changing front wheel

Passing by the tire care today was an excellent chance to shoot a few pictures. That, and the fact that I found a new way (at least for me) to make black-and-white toned images in Gimp, pushed me into some experimentation.

If you are interested in the Gimp trick that I’ve learned it goes like this: open the file with you picture, do all the usual stuff like unsharpening mask, leveling, etc. Than go to Filters. When there select Colors. Than Decompose. RGB woks fine. Make sure though that every channel will become a layer (there is a checkbox on the bottom of the form). You’ll get a new image with three layers, one for each color (red, green, blue). Play with layers, overlaying, and all that stuff. When you are done, press Ctrl+M. This is for “Merge visible layers”. This operation will combine all your layers into a single layer. Now go to Image menu and Flatten image. Now you will be able to change image mode from Greyscale (which was set by Gimp when creating this image) to RGB. This function is in Image menu, under Mode. Just click on RGB. From this point on Gimp will think that your image is colored, although it is black and white. Now you can adjust the color balance which will tone your image. To do so, go the Layers menu and select Colors option. There you will see the Color balance. Play with the scroll bars for different tones until you get the desired effect.

That’s all folks!

Album location: /photos/2005/2005-02-18_POTD

Tire care

Tires on my car are getting old and bald. Unfortunately I don’t have the budget to replace them now and driving like they are is not fun anymore. So I decided to swap the front tires with back ones to buy myself a couple of month.

I passed by the 24×7 tire care service. While one technician was swapping the wheels, balancing them and checking for other problems, I was talking to another one. He told me a few interesting things that I didn’t know or forgot about.

  • There is a specification of how bad one’s tires can be. Police is actually cheching tires on the cars once in a while. Offenders are fined 50 CYP per tire. I thought that there should be a law about it and fines and everything, but the accuracy of the claim should be taken with a grain of salt from the guy who sells tires for life. Anyway, so far I seem to have one tire which is illiegal.
  • In Cyprus, all cars older than 4 years must have an MOT check (mechanical compliance test). There is a fine for not having MOT certificate. But that’s not all. Without MOT certificate one can’t pay the road tax. Unpaid road tax is a finable offense by itself. And that is still not it. Without the MOT certificate, the insurance is invalid and non-enforcable. That’s right – if you will have an accident, your insurance won’t pay up unless you have an MOT certificate. Interesting, isn’t it?

So, all these news just show that I will be spending a bit more money in the near future than I wanted. Firstly, I’ll have to bring the car for service and get an MOT certification while I am at it. Than I’ll have to go pay the road tax. And than I’ll have to save some money for the tires. I need to buy at least 2 of those. All of these make an amount of roughly 400 CYP shine much nearer than the horizon. Oh, well… At least I enjoy every kilometer driven in my car.