Wednesday, July 28, 2010

I know what I'm eating for breakfast tomorrow.

Some people like cupcakes better. I for one care less for them! 
Frank Zappa, "Muffin Man"

A few weeks ago, I saw this recipe for blueberry crumb muffins at Evil Shenanigans which is a very cool cooking site. I first discovered the site from a YouTube clip where the author prepared a king cake that Sandra Lee made on Semi Homemade Meals, with very different results.

Anyway, while her photos look great, because she knows how to pose the food, my muffins might not look quite as attractive, since they were just photographed on a cooling rack using a cell phone camera. But they taste great:

In an attempt to play around with it, I did some work with the free Photoshop clone. The name of that clone is The GNU Image Manipulating Program (because the sort of people who put out free programs think it's hilarious to say "I played with The GIMP today." GNU is a recursive acronym, which means GNU's not Unix, by the way.)

I have Photoshop at work, but won't spend hundreds of dollars to use it at home. When I tried the GNU Image Manipulation Program a few years ago, it was almost unusable. Now, it's a lot better, and almost as usable as Photoshop. This would be higher praise if Photoshop wasn't such a pain.

I didn't do anything too fancy. I just cropped an individual muffin, and then played with the lighting and colors to make it look more attractive. Strangely enough, the blueberry muffins looked too blue. Adding a touch of yellow really makes a difference.
 

Here's a close-up of the second muffin from the bottom right. Below is the same muffin with adjusted colors.


2 comments:

  1. I am so pleased you enjoyed the muffin recipe! :) And thank you for the kind words regarding my site and photos. So, you found me via my Semi-Homemade Test Kitchen videos? They were a dare from a friend, who knows how I detest Sandra. She said her food could not be that bad. Yeah ... ok. :) Thanks again for stopping by!

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  2. Thank you. I came to your site for the videos, but stuck around for the awesome looking recipes. Your muffin recipe is a great way to start the day.

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