Verses Versus Choruses

I can still remember that moment when a little bit of my youthful optimism died. It was Hall & Oats who did it. In particular it was their song, Private Eyes.

Seriously, Rosemary?

At the start of 2010, a company that makes music software (Image-Line) announced a new product that they would soon be selling: Drumatrix. It combined a physically modeled drum set and an internal step sequencer. And you could name your own price. And they would donate some of the money to Haiti. How cool is that? Very.

It wasn't long, however, until they were sent notice that "drumatrix" was a term already in use by someone else; somebody named Rosemary Schonfeld, who has written a book on "a different approach to drumming" called Drumatrix. I should point out here that I don't know the exact order of events. It may be that Image-Line started work on their project, noticed the name after doing a search, sent an inquiry and then received a negative reply.

Photoshop Follies - Refusing to Open

Here's an odd one, and I figured I should post it in case it happens to someone else and they want to know how to fix the problem. I know it will happen to others because I've read about it elsewhere. Can't hurt to make sure there's another place with the info, though.

I opened up Photoshop CS3 today and tried to open a file to edit. No go. Not through the browser, not via drag and drop. It also wouldn't create a new file. Not just odd, but annoying; scary if you're on a tight deadline, I'm sure.

The fix is to change your default printer to a local one and/or make sure your printer is attached and on. (A reboot may also be necessary.) You read that right. Doesn't matter if it was never a problem before. Doesn't matter that it makes no sense whatsoever.

Photoshop doesn't open or create files? Blame the printer settings.

Hmm... now I have that file open and I forget what I was going to do with it!

Touch Ups: Photo Finessing and Mangling

I take a lot of photos. Some might say too many, but digital is cheap and my skills are weak so I feel my best chance is to take too many and then weed out the bad ones. I'd say the ratio of good to bad is about 1:100, so I pretty much have to take a lot of photos.

Weeding is very important, because I process every single photo before I publish it. (Publish? That sounds too official for what I do. I just put 'em on websites for nobody to look at.) That would be a lot of work, if I processed all the bad ones, too. Mostly, I use Photoshop to tighten the photos up; darken the darks and lighten the lights. It can make a pretty profound difference. There is an auto-level correction function in Photoshop, but I rarely use it because it often fixes things that I don't want fixed. For example, it finds orange to be unnatural and will lessen the amount of orange for you no matter how much orange is supposed to be there. So I do the settings manually.

Lately, I have also been doing some extra processing to my photos. These extra steps include exaggerating focus, colour saturation and contrast. With just a few changes, a basic photo can have much more character. I'll show some examples...