new client activity

one thing can lead to another.

the minutos have been clients for nearly ten years. mostly, i keep there ‘puter running. they started with a packard bell (a cursed machine) that would completely quit working every couple of months. after rebuilding that machine several times, we finally built a new machine. from there we kept moving up, finally switching to a 24″ iMac (alum) early this year.

Frank is a professional artist — very prolific. he also teaches for the Palos verdes Art Center. Debs is a photographer, and she specializes in artist’s portfolios – photographing the originals and printing quality giclees. every once in awhile she calls for help with a project in photoshop. her call this week was to create a CD of one of Frank’ss series to present to galleries. it was an excellent time to introduce her to lightroom.

we used lightroom to adjust the images of a few of the photos and to create a screensaver of the series. we also experimented with how it would create a webpage presentation of the series. they liked the result so much, we’re finally going to put Frank’s work online! as i’ve been pushing for this for a couple years, i’m absolutely delighted.

we’re now figuring out just exactly how we’re going to upload the files. one new aspect we’re going to try is embedded videos of Frank’s “gallery statements”. we’re going to give him approximately 10 minutes to record a short description of the series, as though he were presenting it in a class lesson. we’ll probably use viddler, but (just in case) i’m going to try a few things with garageband. after showing the screensaver to another client, there’s even a possibility of having some original music for the site as well.

i guess i’m branching out into “production”.

creating a logo

well, actually not. what i’m doing is cutting a logo from a photo using CS3. this could be really tricky, depending on the photo. but photoshop has some cool tools that really help.

the photo in use is one i took at the Star Trek Tour. over the entry was a huge and beautiful panel and the picture i took shows it very clearly. the Queen Mary Dome is white on top, but the entrance is dark. selecting just the logo should be fairly easy.

the quick select tool is really a bonus. with a little patience, i was able to select the entire border and not the doorframe. but there are a few blurs along the edge where the contrast fades away. not too bad, really, but the edges look a little choppy at first.

copied it onto a new layer, hid the background and now i’ve got a very sharp contrast. i also have a great cintiq 20WSX monitor. can easily zoom in, and move around the edges. can expand and contract the eraser easily, too. so now i’m just smoothing out the edges a little…

i’ll be using it in a newsletteer reviewing the Tour for the O*W*C.

not bad at all

so i trimmed most of the photos to 160 pixels wide, and cut down the number of pictures. then i combined 7 photos of costumed attendees to a nice composite about 480 pixels wide. i love layers

i have to remember to name the layers as i create them. sometimes the thumbnails are small enough that it’s a little hard to identify which layer i want to move or transform… still, the results were nice and the entire review with 14 pictures capped out at 168kb…

changeing layouts

sometimes the best laid plans aren’t… i thought i was almost done with the newsletter supplement, but when i got the pictures inserted, i hated the look of it. that happens sometimes.

needless to say – i’m back at the drawing board, and adjusting the layout and the size of the images to suit it better. it might take a few more days, and i may end up cutting the number of images down by a large percentage. it’s just a newsletter, after all… it shouldn’t look cluttered and hard to read.