The Magnetic Lasso Tool

Last night, I worked with the Magnetic Lasso tool and tried to make a selection using it. I liked the choices of adding to a selection, subtracting from a selection, or creating an intersection of two selections. I didn't like how the Magnetic Lasso tool would place points by itself, because it thought it needed one there. I disliked the look of the cursor. It wasn't clear to me where I was going to create a point when I clicked. It wasn't at the cross hair, and it wasn't at a point on the triangle of the icon. Zooming in did not help. After my first pass with the Magnetic Lasso, I had to go back and make corrections many times. It was not a quick process, and the shape I'd chosen to practice on was ideal, with lots of contrast. I gave up and stopped refining my selection long before it was accurate.

The auto selection tools, like the Magnetic Lasso and the Magic Wand, are all fine and dandy but for the most control and the best results the Pen tool is the way to go. The more I try to work with the auto selection tools, the more I believe this. The same task done with the pen tool would have taken less time and given better results.

Percent, Not Pixels!

I just went to the Zutter Bind-It-All page and took a peek. It is a Bad Thing to have a horizontal scroll bar when displaying a web page. Awful as it is, it's easy to avoid. Most applications used to create websites have an alert you can set to let you know you have erred before you make it public that you failed Web Design 101.

What has web design got to do with a Bind-it-all? Not a heck of a lot, not directly. But their web presence is a visual disaster and contains what I consider to be a basic error in coding. To me, that is a sign of clueless management. If the employees are just being sloppy workers, management should fire them. If they are untrained, management needs to help them get training.

Websites That Suck is where I first started learning about web design. It has been around, in some form or another since 1995.

Another Horrible Example

Agghh! I'm reading about another hard drive that failed and the person did not have an adequate back-up system in place. She saved her photos (Yay!) but lost all of her digital scrapping kits. (Boo!) Recently, several major shops have changed their policies so you must pay a fee to recover digital purchases lost in a computer failure, if they support recovery at all.

It's a matter of personal choice as to how much effort you want to put into backing up your data. Most of the time, people move their data to a new computer before the drive on the old machine fails. But that is no promise that a drive will not fail before you move to a new machine. A backup made today is a million times more useful than a backup you have not made yet, even if you never need it.

Just Saying...

Well written directions for a poor technique are going to give poor results.

I've been entertaining myself by reading some of the free instruction on the web for how to do digital scrapping tricks. I can enlarge the font in Firefox.

I ran into the most tortured workaround I have ever heard of for doing an extraction. The directions had me create a crude clipping mask layer, then edit it after I had clipped my image to it. I'd see my image trim down as I erased and painted to add or subtract from my clipping mask layer. But I wasn't really editing my image. If I moved my image layer, I was in trouble.

A clipping mask is a shape, it isn't a specific location. If I move the bottom layer, the shape will move to a different location. If I move the top layer, it's not going to change the location of the shape in the layout, but it will change what part of the top layer can be seen. I can move the top layer completely off the shape in the bottom layer and then I can't see anything of the top layer at all. It's still 'clipped' but not where I can see it.

To add to the annoyance, I was told to use an eraser tool and a brush tool to erase and to add back. OK. If I make lots of mistakes, why can't I just use History and try again, instead of having to switch tools and colors? That's a lot of clicking to put back a hand wobble.

Another problem is in the anti-alias. Anti alias is a smoothing, or blurring effect, and it cannot be completely removed by adjusting the hardness of the brush tip I am using. Even a one-pixel brush set at 100% hardness is going to have some anti-alias. If I am working in black on a white background and I zoom in to 500%, I'll see some gray pixels at the edges. That's anti-alias at work. With a larger brush, I have the joy of knowing that the cursor might be a circle I can see, but erasing doesn't happen at the exact edge of the circle. What I see at the edge of the circle is a color change, but not a complete erase. That happens in the middle of the circle and I can't place it exactly. With a harder brush it is closer to the edge, but never exactly at the edge.

A pencil is a precise tool, with no anti-alias at the edge. But switching back and forth from a soft edge eraser to a precision edge pencil doesn't mean that I'll get a precise shape as a result.

The directions were clear, with graphics and arrows and a lovely sample photo. But it was not what I'd consider the best way to get results. I'm still a fan of the Pen tool.

Don't forget, "Anything free is worth what you pay for it." That includes directions.

Vision Again or Vision Still

I've been waiting for new glasses to arrive for a while now. My prescription is complex, taking two pages to write out the whole thing. I have eyestrain almost all the time and I'm just not that interested in working on digital layouts. I've gone to paper that I can see and am working on pages for the photo carousel. It seems to be a fall back project for me. And right now, it feels like Fall is back.

It Isn't That Complicated

That SamandDean layout? The one where it was crumpled and I wanted to crumple the photos as well? I thought it would be difficult and that I'd have to do all sorts of complex and annoying things to the photos. All I have to do is make sure that my layer order is OK. I place my photos and embellishments into the layout, making any adjustments like cropping or such. Then I put the top adjustment layer onto the top of the layer stack. Poof! Crumpled photos, frames and embellishments.

If All You Have is a Hammer...

Everything that's broken suddenly needs a nail.

I ran out of black ink for my document printer. I got through a few extra pages with a 'mixing' option, but when the black ran out, I was stuck. This printer was not going to be nice and let me squeak out a few more pages in purple or brown instead of black. It refused to print anything.

Sigh. I got a set of the four inks that the printer requires. But I only needed to replace the black. I'm going to do a little shopping around and see if I can find just the black. I use it up faster than I use the colors and the containers of ink are the same size.

I know that you get better quality printing when there are more colors of ink for the printer to use. I do not care about quality from this printer, I don't want to be forced to buy extra colors of ink when all I need is black.