Lava360 » Press

Showcase of Classic & Modern James Bond Movie Posters

lava360 — Fri, 03 Sep 2010 10:35:58 +0000

British Navy Commander James Bond, CMG, RNVR is a fictional character created by novelist Ian Fleming in 1953. He is the main protagonist of the James Bond series of novels, films, comics and video games. He is portrayed as an SIS agent residing in London. From 1995 onwards, SIS would be officially acknowledged as MI6. Bond holds the code number 007, except for the novel You Only Live Twice, where he temporarily becomes “7777″.

James Bond posters have become one of the most popular items of film memorabilia. Launched to advertise Dr No in 1962, the posters have continued to become extremely popular and successful. With some of the rarest original posters reaching thousands of pounds, the world of James Bond posters forever continues to astound, aspire and entertain. The James Bond movie posters have always captured elements that have made the films so successful. Often featuring scantily clad seductive women, exotic locations and devious villains; the posters portray a dangerous – sometimes violent, yet exciting, combination of elements.

It is in the James Bond posters that the world first saw some of the most famous images associated with the secret agent. From Gold finger’s golden girl image to the striking pose of Bond holding his gun across his chest, or the introduction of the famous 007 logo in Dr. No, the posters continue to develop introducing new ideas and concepts. As James Bond grows from strength to strength, so do the posters, leaving Bond fans and collectors the world over eagerly awaiting the next James Bond poster campaign.

Dr. No

From Russia With Love

Goldfinger

Thunderball

You Only Live Twice

On Her Majesty’s Secret Service

Diamonds Are Forever

Live And Let Die

The Man With The Golden Gun

The Spy Who Loved Me

Moonraker

For Your Eyes Only

Octopussy

A View To A Kill

The Living Daylights

Licence To Kill

Goldeneye

Tomorrow Never Dies

The World Is Not Enough

Die Another Day

Casino Royale

Quantum of Solace

Book Review. The Design of Sites (2nd Edition)

lava360 — Sun, 06 Jun 2010 14:15:27 +0000

This book is written for anyone involved in the design and implementation of a Web site. Its focus is tilted more toward Web design professionals, such as interaction designers, usability engineers, information architects, and visual designers. But this book is also written to be a resource for anyone on a Web development team, from business executives to advertising managers to software developers to content editors.

AUTHORS

Douglas K. van Duyne,
James A. Landay and
Jason I. Hong,
together offer more than a quarter century of research, design, academic and industry experience. Industry professionals.

Why Use This Book?

You’re probably wondering how this book is any different from the numerous other Web design books out there. This unique book is not about programming or any specific technology. Nor is it a quick fix for all of the problems you and your team will face in developing a Web site. No single book can do that. What this book does offer are principles, processes, and patterns to help you develop successful customer-centered Web sites. With this customer-centered focus, your Web site can be relevant, self-explanatory, and easy to use.

Creating a Web site is easy. Creating a successful Web site that provides a winning experience for your target audience is another story, and that’s what this book is about. And when you’re finished reading it, it will be a valuable reference tool to keep on your desk. You can turn to it again and again as you design, redesign, and evaluate sites.

Your target customers will differ. Depending on your business, they might be members in a club, students of a university, concerned citizens, or paying shoppers. The goals of each of these audiences will also vary, but the challenge for you is the same: creating an interactive interface that provides tangible value to the people who go to your site. The patterns in this book provide you and your team with a common language to articulate an infinite variety of Web designs. We developed the language because we saw people solving the same design problems over and over at great time and expense. The patterns examine solutions to these problems. We present the best practices from our consulting experience, our research experience, and our Web development experience gathered in one place. In The Design of Sites, we give you the tools to understand your customers better, help you design sites that your customers will find effective and easy to use, shorten your development schedules, and reduce maintenance costs.

If you do not have “customers,” think of target audiences. One focus of the book is the design of e-commerce Web sites; however, you can successfully apply the majority of the content to make any Web site better.

Who Should Read This Book?

Web Design Professionals

Start with Chapters 1 and 2 to understand the motivation for customer-centered design and the patterns approach to Web design. If you already
have a strong background in the principles (Chapters 3 and 4) and processes (Chapter 5) of customer-centered design, you can skim these chapters and move quickly to the patterns themselves (Part II of the book). If you have less experience, the three chapters on customer-centered design and development (3 through 5) should prove useful for whatever kind of Web site you’re developing.

Buy This Book From Amazon

Celebrity Steroids. Really Funny Photo Editing

lava360 — Fri, 07 May 2010 18:47:24 +0000

What if Keira Knightley got these huge muscles and Mr Obama without shirt and showing his steroid body? We find these amazingly funny photo editing on worth1000.com and its a really worthy to share with you people. Lets have some fun.

Gemma Atkinson By Daroth

Barack Obama By mjhaylor

Charlize Theron By Mandrak

Thurman Ms.Olympia By emilliom

Megan with Muscles By Alliex

Charisma Carpenter By Turbo99

No longer a string Bean By havril

Snoop Bomb By fredreis

Mrs Muscle By mzpresto

Owen wilson and Eddie Murphy By robmay82

Monica By leech2

Heidi Klum By underworth

Tara Conner By Turbo99

Are you looking at me? By ChrisEll

Bullock By griker

Milena Govich By Turbo99

Kate Beckinsale By Turbo99

Jessica Simpson By Turbo99

Demi Moore By Turbo99

Charlize Theron By Turbo99

George Muscles By frank1956

Bill Gates pumped up By Fabbio84

Anna Faris By Turbo99

Buffy By jasons805

Angelina Jolie By Turbo99

Salma Hayek By Turbo99

Jessica Alba By Turbo99

Sarah Michelle Gellar By Turbo99

Keira Knightley By Turbo99

Ashley Judd By Turbo99

Jennifer Love Hewitt By Turbo99

Jim Carrey goes wild By dsandstr

Gaga Juice By Jenny1218

Tyra Steroids By raekoe

Adobe’s New Photoshop CS5 – Impressive

lava360 — Tue, 13 Apr 2010 15:02:20 +0000

Wired.com – Photographers have their own version of sleight of hand. They can manipulate people, objects, landscapes and light in images, fooling lesser humans into believing the final product is a representation of reality, rather than something created by hand. In the old language, we called this “trick photography.” Now, in the PC age, we just call it “Photoshop.”

The latest version of Photoshop, the flagship image-editing application in Adobe’s Creative Suite, adds a new stack of cards to the photographer’s trick deck.

Wired.com was shown demos of new tools in Photoshop CS5 — such as the new Content Aware Fill and HDR tools — that we expect will amaze and please photographers with the tools’ ability to bend pixels with absolute precision.

Photoshop CS5 will arrive as part of Adobe Creative Suite 5, the company’s package of 14 productivity apps for visual designers, photographers and publishers. Creative Suite 5 will ship later this month (or possibly early May) according to Adobe.

Prices for the suite range between $1,300 and $2,600 depending on which package you buy, with upgrades priced between $500 and $1,500. Photoshop CS5 alone will cost $700, or $200 for an upgrade. Photoshop CS5 Extended, which has some additional tools, will cost $1,000, or $350 for an upgrade.

This year marks the 20th anniversary of Photoshop’s arrival, and there are certainly several “wow” features in Photoshop CS5 which achieve a level of technological advancement most of us couldn’t have even dreamed of twenty years ago.

Most impressive is the new Content Aware Fill brush, a mind-bending tool that can remove large objects from photos, altering the background to make it realistically appear as though the object was never there. It can zap tourists, delete power lines and otherwise alter photos with click-and-drag ease.

This video shows it most plainly. Fast forward to about the halfway point if you want to see the really crazy stuff. (When this video first started making the rounds in March, some thought it was a hoax. It’s not — this is a real feature of Photoshop CS5.)

As with any new tool in Photoshop, expect Content Aware Fill to be overused: A surfeit of tourist-free images of Machu Picchu will soon be littering Flickr. But beyond the novelty, it’s a truly useful touch-up tool that turns what used to be hours of work into a simple drag of the brush.

Speaking of brushes, all of the painting features in Photoshop — neglected since the release of Photoshop 7 — have been rewritten. The app now features much more realistic interactions. If you use a digitizer tablet, you’ll find that your brushes are considerably more responsive. The angle of the stylus now controls the edge of the brush and the new paint mixing tools control color blending, wetness and bristle length, making for a very life-like painting experience.

Another bit of Photoshop trickery that’s become popular lately is high dynamic range imaging, or HDR. The Flickr crowd is crazy for it, and Adobe has responded by improving Photoshop’s Merge to HDR tool, which helps you create HDR images.

The new HDR tool now has 14 HDR presets which can save considerable effort when hand-toning an image. The HDR presets shipping with Photoshop range from the cartoonish to the fairly realistic, and should satisfy all but the pickiest of HDR enthusiasts.

Composing a real HDR image requires multiple photos taken with multiple exposures, but now you can fake it. Photoshop CS5 has a new set of tools to create what Adobe calls “single image HDRs.” The results will never quite match a true HDR with multiple images, but the new single image HDR toning dialog lets you get pretty close using just one file.

Also incredibly helpful for HDR fans is the new “remove ghosts” tool in the HDR dialog, which makes it simple to eliminate ghosting and artifacts caused by differences between your layered HDR images. With Photoshop CS5, you can simply outline a ghosted area (say, for example, a flower that moved in the breeze between shots) and select a single layer for the portion of the image.

Photoshop CS5 isn’t just new brushes. There’s been plenty of attention to performance — the Mac OS X version is now fully 64-bit native, the same enhancement the Windows version got in in CS4. That means that you could, in theory, throw as much as 128 GB RAM at Photoshop.

This update further deepens Photoshop’s integration with Bridge, Adobe’s file browsing tool. Bridge can now be embedded in a palette within Photoshop (known as Mini Bridge). You can quickly navigate through your images using the familiar Bridge interface without needing to leave Photoshop. Interestingly, the UI metaphor for Mini Bridge seems influenced by the iPhone — when you navigate through folders, the interface slides left and right.

Photoshop CS5 also gets the same massive overhaul to the Camera Raw engine that we’ve seen in the forthcoming Lightroom 3. Camera RAW in both apps offers much better sharpening and noise reduction, which is impressive not so much for its ability to remove noise, but to retain detail while doing so.

Photoshop CS5 also has a few tricks designed to make designers’ lives easier, particularly the new Puppet Warp tools, which allow you to make path-like selections and bend, warp, shorten, lengthen and twist an object.

Wired.com was shown a demo by Photoshop product manager Bryan O’Neil Hughes. He took an image of an elephant with a straight trunk and, with just three selection points, he bent and curled the trunk back so the elephant appeared to be eating.

Puppet Warp introduced almost no distortion into the finished image. Puppet Warp also provides a much easier and faster way to straighten tilted horizons.

We were also impressed with the new Lens Correction tool, which fixes distortion and other lens artifacts using profiles tailored to correct specific camera lenses (the lens type is determined by embedded EXIF data, so Photoshop can determine that automatically).

Most of the other smaller features that make this release of Photoshop a must-have are user-suggested features and workflow improvements. Adobe solicited user suggestions, filtered through the ideas, picking some three dozen ideas and making them a part of Photoshop CS5.

Photoshop has several outstanding new features — it’s probably worth the price of the upgrade just for the new Content Aware Fill tool, the 64-bit boost and the improvements to Camera RAW — but what really sells this release is amount of time it promises to save you.

Among our favorites workflow improvements: You can now adjust the opacity and fill percentages on multiple layers simultaneously; the Save for Web dialog is available in 16-bit mode (and handles downsizing to 8-bit automatically); and Photoshop has the ability to save layer styles as a default behavior that even persists across sessions.

Adobe has done an impressive job of focusing not just on the whiz-bang features, but on how photographers, designers and digital artists spend their time using Photoshop, and how making small changes can speed up their workflows.

——————————————————————————-

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Copyright 2010 Wired.com.
Courtesy of CNN

Stunning Drawings of Famous Celebrities

lava360 — Wed, 16 Dec 2009 15:20:23 +0000

Stunning and excellent Pencil Drawings of some of the famous celebrities from DeviantArt.

Love it or Hate it! Celebrities without Makeup II

lava360 — Sun, 13 Dec 2009 09:42:24 +0000

Most celebs wouldn’t be caught dead without makeup, but sometimes they find themselves in the wrong place — right in front of the paparazzi’s camera.

Vanessa Hudgens
She definitely has a pretty face, but her cheeks look slimmer when she uses blush. And that sexy tan… it doesn’t exist at all.

Angelina Jolie
Do you see any difference? Not really, right? Angelina is a beauty and she has a nice and healthy skin.

Miley Cyrus
All sweaty and making funny faces, it’s hard to tell who she is. Without make up, Miley doesn’t seem to be that pretty, right?

Jennifer Lopez
She’s a diva on the red carpet and wherever she shows up, everyone notices. But she needs to thank her stylist, because without any makeup, she looks extremely pale and quite different from the artist so many girls want to imitate and boys wanna meet.

Brooke Shields
Her beautiful eyes must be hidden somewhere behind those wrinkles… can you see them? And of course, we are aware that Brooke likes to show off a nice natural tan.

Kim Kardashian
It was hard to recognize Kim. Without the eyelashes and lipstick, her sensuality is completely lost.

Jennifer Garner
Maybe she was in a hurry and that’s why she looks so pale. Jen, if you are going out like that, please, at least wear dark sunglasses to cover those eyebags! Blush is probably one of her favorite cosmetics.

Adriana Lima
Supermodel, work your thing! Proof once more that even someone who’s supposed to be one of the prettiest ladies in the world looks super ordinary without an inch of makeup.

Beyonce
Wow, nice curls! Makes someone appreciate that their makeup kit truly is “Irreplaceable”.

WordPress Wins CMS Award

lava360 — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 16:33:32 +0000

I was very excited last week to learn that WordPress has been awarded the Overall Best Open Source CMS Award in the 2009 Open Source CMS Awards. This is a landmark for us, as it is the first time we’ve won this award, and it marks a shift in the public perception of WordPress, from blog software to full-featured CMS. No small contest, the Open Source CMS Awards received over 12,000 nominations and more than 23,000 votes across five categories.

As Hiro Nakamura said when he first bent time and space to land in Times Square: “Yatta!”

In addition to winning in the Overall Best Open Source CMS category, WordPress was named first runner-up in the Best Open Source PHP CMS category. This is significant because we weren’t even in the top 5 last year, and now we’re #2, ahead of Joomla! As is stated on the Award site, “WordPress made its way into the top five for the first time. The fact that it was outranked by Drupal by a very slight margin indicates how popular it has become with users as well as developers over the past year.”

Every day thousands of new people are embracing WordPress to power not just their blogs but entire sites and communities without compromising on usability or scalability (as would be the case with a legacy CMS). Every member of the WordPress community, from core developer to beginning user, should be proud to be part of this momentum: congratulations to us all!

From The WordPress Blog

Adobe Opens up Washington

lava360 — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 12:54:50 +0000

The Obama administration has made transparency and public access to government information a high priority. Adobe is attempting to capitalize on initiatives to make government information more accessible while promoting its technologies, such as Flash and PDF, as cornerstones for implementing open access. However, these technologies are actually an impediment to making information truly accessible.

Adobe has set up its “Adobe Opens Up” website to promote the use of Adobe technologies to achieve the goal of “opening up Washington,” as well as highlighting ways in which federal, state, and local governments have implemented these technologies. While we agree that making information available in common formats, like PDF, is one helpful piece of this puzzle, we can’t help but notice how the entire site—designed in Flash—is practically inaccessible.

After just a cursory browsing, here are some of the usability and data accessibility issues we observed. You can’t select, copy, or paste any text. Your browser’s font override features won’t work, so you can’t adjust the font or its size to be more readable. Your browser’s built-in in-page search won’t work, and you can’t use the keyboard to scroll through the text. You can’t parse or scrape the data in any way; the design is fixed-width, so it’s not going to work well on different screen sizes; and browser plugins, like Greasemonkey, can’t adjust anything. Basically when it comes to text at all, if you don’t like the style or are visually impaired, you’re screwed.

Wrapping all publicly accessible information in proprietary formats is neither a good nor complete solution. Providing documents in PDF form, or augmenting a website with additional Flash content is certainly useful. However, the goal of open government would be better served using open standards, like HTML, XML, JSON, ODF, and other formats that are both accessible and machine-readable. Doing so ensures that public information truly remains usable by the public.

Party Pics: Hollywood

lava360 — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 21:20:27 +0000

French Connection Holiday Shop

Vampire Diaries‘ star Kayla Ewell rocks a red dress from French Connection’s collection. Find out about her character’s future on the show!

Courtesy StarTracks Photo

BillionDollarBabes.com Opening Night Sale With Clothes Off Our Back

Jennie Garth takes home a sweet treat in addition to whatever deals she scored at the designer sale.

Courtesy Getty Images

AFI Fest Screening of Bad Lieutenant: Port Of Call New Orleans

Eva Mendes literally sparkles at a screening of her new movie. Love her festive dress!

Steve Granitz/Getty Images

Sony Cierge Holiday Preview Party

Kellan Lutz picks up a camera at the soiree held at the SLS Hotel…perhaps to capture all the upcoming New Moon madness?

Christopher Polk/Getty Images

Everybody’s Fine Premiere

Costars Kate Beckinsale and Drew Barrymore reunite on the red carpet to promote their new movie. Afterward, Kate headed to the film’s afterparty at h.wood.

Jordan Strauss/Getty Images

100 Most Astonishing Movie Posters

lava360 — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 22:28:22 +0000

Have you ever fell in love with a movie poster? Probably most of us did. Most people just love watching movies. But have we really appreciate this common and yet eloquent artwork? When have these movie posters started? Do they really have a beginning? With that, we need to travel back in time and see when they started.

In the early days, movie stars were unknown because their names did not appear on posters. The movie studios liked it that way so they wouldn’t have to pay more money to actors. Until such time when movie studios realized that actors were as much an attraction for the moviegoers as the movie itself. So the movie star was born. And that gave birth to movie posters. Movie posters started showcasing the names of the actors and the title of the movie, as well

During the golden years of silent movies, posters became more artistic and spectacular. But when the second world war broke out. It forced studios and film producers to cut back in their budget; thus cutting cost even with their advertisement including movie posters. Movie posters during the 60’s era depicted the changing social climate. As things progressed, the posters began to reflect the changing attitude of people toward violence and sex. The use of photographic art has taken over the printed artwork. The 70’s era popularized black movies, somewhat tearing down the demarcation of races. Movie posters from Star wars and Star trek were much admired. They were responsible for making movie poster collectors out of many fans, as movie poster collections rapidly progresses through the years. It has also become fashionable; it even sprouted various video poster stores.

Everyone would agree that the now popular movie poster has a long and rich history. A piece of art that is so often-overlooked by many, but a variable tool which flourished in history. It’s good to know that nowadays more and more people appreciate movie posters, thus in the long run they eventually call themselves collectors.

In this post we will feature movie posters that were selected by how creative and artistic they were presented, regardless of genre and classification, Friends let your visual senses feast on 100 of the most astonishing movie posters in the world.