A Comedy of Errors

Pulled a late nighter last night - basically my sleep bucket was full and so why bother going to bed? I had not taken the steps for our next 'Art Project' - Mormon Row and Gary mentioned that he would be home soon (yeah! Feb 19th) and that I needed to get the canvas ordered so that he could make the frames.

We came up with a scheme to decide on the size.

I measured the width of the wall where we wanted to hang it, took a photo of that wall, cropped the photo to get just that wall (using my new trusty buddy 'distorted perspective'), resize the wall to scale in inches. Then delete the pictures hanging on the wall. A new blank slate.

THEN, make up the photo, scale it in inches - one saying it is six feet wide, one seven feet. Lay them on the wall, and then to get perspective of the room to help, take the cropped wall and lay it over the original photo (as best I can) so that parts of the other walls are showing.

WHEW!!!

Discovered a GREAT way to remodel. But the: ... should it be THIS? ... or THIS? process is rather lengthy and cumbersome. Saves a load of money when you discovered you made the picture too big for the wall .... (we went with six feet), though.

So ... my before shot:

And my after shot:

Last night, everything SEEMED to be going fine when I discovered the photo I was working on was not the photo I had used in my 'mock up' picture. It was cutting the right side tip of the barn off in the center picture. And we SO could not have that!

Seriously took me an hour to find the photo. I was SO SURE which one I had used, but it clearly was not the right one. And, you know me - there isn't a shot I don't like that I don't decide that if one photo is good, ten, eleven, twelve just might be better.

Was stunned when I found it. I had actually stoped taking photos, stepped two feet to my left (between those two trees on either side of the photo up there) and snapped one single, solitary shot. I guess it has been waiting all this time to be discovered. And the ONLY photo where using the triple canvas technique, I don't crop off a tiny bit of the right side of the barn in the middle photo - thus having both sides with pieces on the end photos. Both Gary and my OCD couldn't handle it.

So ... I scale it up using a trusty algorithm that smooths my pixels the best way photoshop knows how, and start to crop the print for printing on canvas. I'm feeling pretty good. It is late by now but I am buzzed from my 44 ounce Sonic drink, so I forge ahead. Order? Hmmmm - that is $200.00 of speculation right now. Lets take the pieces to upload, crop the 3 inch border off each and see if they line up. If they do ... voilà! You have done the correct overlap on each piece of canvas in your sleep deprived state.

So, back into Photoshop in the wee hours of the morning and start cropping and immediatly discover that I have done it wrong. One piece is 3 inches too thin. Whew!

Start over.

Back into Photoshop in the early morning hours and crop, crop, crop, paste, paste, paste ... everything matches! Now - on to uploading these behomoth files to the printer and get them ordered.

Should I wait until morning? With semi-awake eyes? Nah, what the hell, just get it over with. And I order them. I was smart enough to click the teeny tiny box that says they will send you a pdf preview before printing and charging you for you to approve. In the things they said they would fix if discovered, were any issues converting the color system from RGB (Red, Green, Blue - what your computer monitor displays - an additive color system) to CMYK (Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, Black - what printers print with - a subtractive color system - go look at your printer cartridges and tell me they say cyan, magenta, yellow ... go on ...) and I shouted out loud as the hour hand was dropping farther and farther below horizontal: "I SO KNOW WHAT THAT MEANS NOW!!!". Scared the shit out of Charlie but woke me up a bit. Gave them my credit card info and that was that.

Of course, I forgot to check on what my 're-touched photo' looked like in the CMYK mode until this morning. Did it look fine on my monitor? Damn, who knows? My untrained, unprofessional eye sees NOTHING different ... which I guess is good ...

So - what are the chances that our new 'Art Project' is going to work? I reviewed my math with Gary this morning and surprisingly it sounds like I am spot on. Weird ... last night didn't seem like the time to actually get this thing right.




Who knew?