Nepal

Poor Maya contacted Maddy from Kathmandu (no joke!) asking her to clean up his map of Nepal which shows his sampling areas.  She thought it was beyond her so she asked me to work on it.  Ugh!  A fuzzy, poorly reporduced line map embedded in a word document!  I started by enlarging it in Word then taking a screenshot and pasting it into Photoshop.  In retrospect, I should probably have printed it out and scanned it but I didn’t think of it at the time.  I played around with the contrast to darken the lines as much as possible.  I actually drew in a river and its tributaries, completely guessing!  Then I cleaned up all the schmutz in the background, made new, larger symbols for the lakes, mountains, cities  and sampling sites and we sent it off to Maya.

Unfortunately, I was working with an older map that wasn’t up to date.  After Maddy sent it to Maya, he wrote back to say it was missing some of the data.  So, today I finally found time to revisit it.  In the end I had to add text layers for all of the sampling site labels so, while I was at it, I also rewrote the country and city names that I could make out.  I wish I could have found another map for him.  I even looked on line and would have been willing to shell out a little $$.  However, the only usable thing I found was $500.  That exceeds my generosity!  So, hopefully, this will be enough for Maya to include in his journal submission. I think it’s amazing that I worked on an image for someone in Nepal!  Ah…our shrinking global village. 

Uploading Images to WordPress

Interesting.  WordPress will display an image in CMYK as a thumbnail but not full size.  Linking a CMYK image from Flickr works too.  But, I had to make my images RBG to make them load properly in WordPress.  Interesting.

Simmons Flyer

Matthew Simmons (the world’s leading expert on peak oil) will be speaking on the peak oil dilemma at UNH on April 4. NEK asked me to make a flyer. I wanted to keep it very simple since it’s only page-sized and I wanted it to be eye-catching.

 

I found a great image of an oil derrick on a snowfield at istockphoto (last time I use my personal account to buy images for CRRC). NEK liked it but said it should have a drilling platform. So I found a good but uncredited image of a platform on-line. NEK like it but wanted there to be ice. I gave up at that point but Kathy found an image for me. A teeny tiny web image (read: 72 dpi). I stretched it as much as I could and spent a lot of time cleaning it up. Not great but passable for what it is.

In each case, I placed the image at the bottom of the canvas. On the first 2, I was able to make a gradient on a seperate layer using colors sucked up from the image. Using some judicious blurring and erasing and a seperate layer of paint at low opacity, I blended the images and the gradient layers pretty well. Don’t judge by these images…I sharpened them after I shrunk them.  They printed very nicely.

On the final flyer, the sky was a mess so I ended up erasing all of it and made a circle gradient which I stretched and placed behind the platform layer. I had to get in pretty close to the platform to clean it up but I think it’s not too bad. Also, there is an additional gradient layer (linear) in the very back to give color and depth to the sky. The circle gradient is light grey to transparent, the linear gradient is blue to transparent and the background is blue.

PowerPoint and Transparent Gifs

For some reason, I’ve always thought that transparent gifs don’t work in PowerPoint.  At least the ones that I make.  However, I was sending different versions of the WERC logo to Zach today and wanted to make it transparent for their presentations and posters.  I found instructions on making parts of gifs transparent in PowerPoint and started to follow them.  I imported the gif I’d created in Photoshop and, lo, it was transparent.  Maybe it’s just the ones that I suck up a color to be transparent (that shows grey in Powerpoint).  More investigation will have to be done.