Jordan Castillo Price's Blog, page 39

Photoshop Friday - transform zoom

I was lucky enough to win a ticket to Photoshop world a couple of years ago, and when Scott Kelby showed this tip, the room gasped. It's utilitarian, and if you already use your keyboard to navigate your document, you may already know it. But if you don't...it's a MASSIVE timesaver.


You know how when you pull a very high-resolution photo into a lower resolution composition and you're scrolling and zooming all over so you can find the bigger image's corners to re-size it? You can find your corners with a few keystrokes.



I'll start with this image of Paul that I bought for the Turbulence series and now I can't use because he's too blurry and grainy...not that I'm bitter or anything. I'll make it much lower resolution than it is, only 300 pixels wide, to illustrate my point.

Now I'll pretend I want to bring in a Bermuda background. Here's one.


Only it's HUGE. I've dragged it onto Paul's document, but all I can see is a palm tree trunk. I've hit command-T for transform, but I can only access one handle in the upper right hand corner. I could zoom and scroll and whatnot, but here's the trick that left the room agog. While I'm STILL in transform and I haven't yet accepted the transformation, hit command-0 and the canvas automatically zooms to make all the handles visible. Then you can grab and position it easily.



And here's Paul standing in a crappily composed montage with no attention to blending or lighting.


Similar key commands:
command-1 brings you to 100% view
command-0 (not in transform mode) zooms your view in or out to fill the screen

Five hundred is good....

In my ideal world, I'd write 1-2000 usable words per day (plus my admin and social networking stuff) but today kicked my butt. I had to write a conversation, and first I needed to determine where both sides were coming from, and what it needed to convey, and exactly how offensive I wanted the offensive party to be. And wow, this 500-word conversation took me all day.

I was watching the film Temple Grandin to research autism for the Mnevermind series, and on the pass I watched it with the audio commentary from the screenwriter, he pointed out a scene that he'd rewritten 16 times. The scene he finally ended up with went:

"Okay?"
"Okay."

It was a stunning scene, too.

I think I feel compelled in my genre to pump out work fast and sloppy. And it's nice to be reassured that I'm not the only one who thinks it's worthwhile to spend hours getting something just right.

Notion Potion #8: Probing the Problem

And now it's time to see where I was going with that question about what it's called when your creative problems yield interesting results!
Check out this month's Notion Potion at Reviews by Jessewave.

Photoshop Friday - load layers

A little late, but a good tip! This gem is actually about Bridge, which is one of those programs you don't really notice...until you need it to do something that shaves huge amounts of time off your workflow. I fell in love with Bridge when I was digitizing books and needed to batch rotate every other page, and then batch rename hundreds of files at a time.

So here's the scenario. I'm planning a book cover and I'm not quite sure which background I want to use. You never know how the shapes are going to interact with your foreground subject until you put them together. Lots of stuff that looks great in my mind's eye is not-so-great on the page. I downloaded sample files of each background I'll be auditioning. Then it occurred to me that rather than open each file and drag it onto a document, there's a way to automate the process and open a group of files as a layered document, one image per layer.

Not with Photoshop, but with Bridge.

Select all your images, then navigate to the command Tools>Photoshop>Load Files Into Photoshop Layers and voila! They appear as a new untitled multi-layer document in Photoshop and you've just saved yourself A BUNCH of time.

I'm pretty sure I got this tip from Dave Cross on Photoshop TV. Glad to have a reason to use it!

When randomness is perfect

I write in the program Scrivener, which is much more tailored to the way I think than Microsoft Word. One of the writing tools in the program is a random name generator, which I've jury-rigged to generate character traits. (I'm thinking of making it available at some point on JCP Books once I've played with it enough, and if there's demand, and if I can make it work in the PC version too.)

So the personality type to pop up when I hit the random button today is:
average ass

LOL - not just any ass, but your average, garden-variety ass. So very evocative, don't you think? Other good ones on the list include charming pal, eager slob and Machiavellian stud. But I get a kick out of average ass.

Is there a term for this?

I'm trying to figure out if there's a specific term for when you encounter a problem and you end up with a better end product because of the creative workaround you need to employ. Is this even a thing?

My Channeling Morpheus calendar is here!

Holy smokes, this calendar is big! I'm very excited about it, it's just one inch shy of album art size. (I know SOME of you remember vinyl LPs from someplace other than hipster flea markets.)

Here it is with a Kindle for size reference.

The printing quality is top notch. If you want your own 2013 calendar, featuring all TWELVE Channeling Morpheus second edition covers, you can find it at the JCP Books Gift Shop at Cafe Press!

The Sweet Smell of Success

I rocked my to-do list! I did 850 words each on two projects. I climbed on the treadmill again for the first time since my nasty neck/shoulder injury earlier this month and stayed there for the duration of a Twilight Zone episode. AND I also shampooed all the cat pukes off the carpet.

Woo hoo!

Black Friday is a crock

Since it's disgusting me inordinately this year, and since a family member assures me I'm losing out on all kinds of business by not having a sale at my online store, I've opted to post a statement on my main page instead.

Rainbow Awards Treasure Hunt

I'm giving away three novels in the Rainbow Awards Treasure Hunt!


Here are the rules From Elisa Rolle:
So another year is gone, and my Journal is now 6 years old :-) Since end
of November is also really near the time when the Rainbow Awards will
wrap up nicely (on December 8th) this year I want to have a joint party!
So I asked to many of the authors in this year contest to be generous
and donate a book or two... and the answer was overwhelming: 243 among
print and ebooks!

But this time you have to "earn" your prize and
so there is a "little" treasure hunt: nothing complicated but you need
to complete a chain made of Title-Word-Definition-Cover-

Number. How? I will try to explain LOL

We have 243 book titles, you can find them here:

The Books: http://elisa-rolle.livejournal.com/1805679.html (mirrored here if you don't have a LJ account to comment and you are not friend on LJ: http://reviews-and-ramblings.dreamwidth.org/3359348.html)

from each title I extracted a word, but be careful, same word can match more
title, BUT there is an unique matching (example, if I have two titles,
Love Story and Story of Me, "story" match both title, but probably, from
the first title I took "Love" and from the second I took "Story". Your
job to discover the right matching ;-)). You can find the words here:

The Words: http://elisa-rolle.livejournal.com/1805826.html (mirrored here if you don't have a LJ account to comment and you are not friend on LJ: http://reviews-and-ramblings.dreamwidth.org/3359509.html)

to each word corresponds a definition. The definition refers to single
word (even if the word is plural) or not conjugated verb (even if the
word is a conjugated verb). You can find the definitions here:

The Definitions: http://elisa-rolle.livejournal.com/1806109.html (mirrored here if you don't have a LJ account to comment and you are not friend on LJ: http://reviews-and-ramblings.dreamwidth.org/3359969.html)

Once you have the matching Book-Word-Definition, you need to go and search for the Cover here:

https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.446587205375367.103212.100000722741394&type=1&l=1a717d4880

view the right cover, on the comment section there is a comment by me (Elisa
Reviews) with a link to a post on LJ (Rainbow Awards: Current
Submissions). Open the link and see what number was assigned to that
book in that post.

Comment on THIS post (http://elisa-rolle.livejournal.com/1806591.html mirrored here if you don't have a LJ account to comment and you are not friend on LJ: http://reviews-and-ramblings.dreamwidth.org/3360138.html),
sending me: Book Title-Word-Definition-Number. You can pick one book
per day, if tomorrow there will be still available book, I will assign
them. So you can send me more matching but first in-first out, you will
win the first right matching still available book.

Exception, for the Book marked as New there is no Cover/Number, so once you have the
matching Book Title-Word-Definition, you can leave the comment.

And now, lets the party start! Enjoy and good luck with your hunt!