Author: Johanna Wilder

Yes, indeedy.

Oops

Sometimes things just don’t line up properly. When that happens, you can throw the rubber ducky out with the bath water, or you can make a strategic edit. Today while joining two photos into a panorama, I noticed too late that the fences weren’t lining up. The fence stretched the length of the entire photograph, so I couldn’t just pick one and go with it; they had to join together. What I chose to do isn’t optimal, but it’s the best way to hide an obvious mistake so it becomes non-obvious.

Two images join imperfectly, but we've hidden it well

Hiding the dark fence join seam in the dark water reflection was the best place to hide in plain sight. This is, by the way, the same way JPEG compression works. By taking advantage of the way the eye passes over subtle color changes, we can hide imperfections in a photo that allow us to make a file size smaller, or save us hours of editing time making something perfect that doesn’t really have to be, not for our purposes.

Let the viewer’s brain do some image processing for us. It’s one step better than doing everything in The Cloud.

Broadway and John LLR Station Mural, Part 2b

LinkLightRailBwayJohnMosaic

This edit involved both Photoshop and Affinity Design.

In photoshop, as discussed earlier, I added the Obeebo dance steps sculpture from further up Broadway as if it were a zen garden at the foot of the station where the Central Coop will someday be built.

Continue reading Broadway and John LLR Station Mural, Part 2b

Annoying JavaScript Functions

A quick little JavaScript to cycle through an array of hex colors. Installs an interval function to change the background color every second.

// Variables

// install an interval function update_colors() and run it every 1000 milliseconds (once a second)

var closeInterval = window.setInterval(update_colors, 1000);

// global variable to control where we are in the array of colors

var step = 0;

// this is our array of colors

var ColorCycle = [
 "#838a85",
 "#bbaa99",
 "#c6ceb6",
 "#9fb1a2",
 "#748f8b"
];

Everything’s set up. There is no need for a window.onload() function because we’ve installed this as an interval function. That takes care of making sure we aren’t executing on null document objects.

function update_colors() {
 
 // Call a utility function that changes the background color
 
 swap_colors(step);
 
 // step is where we hold the value of the current item in the array
 
 step++;
 
 // Let's not go outside the bounds of the array, please
 
 if (step > ColorCycle.length) {
 step = 0;
 }

}

There we go. All that’s left is a little utility function to do the actual swapping.

function swap_colors(new_color) {
 
 // Change the page background
 
 document.body.style.background = ColorCycle[new_color];
 
 // This necessary for the first time through, but it seems to be unnecessary
 // for subsequent passes. I'm a little bit confused by this, but okay.
 // Changing the background color of the Section object inside <body>
 
var section_style = document.querySelector("section");
 section_style.style.background = ColorCycle[new_color]; 
 
 }

So, as I mention in the comment, changing the “section” object background seems to be necessary since I’ve given it its own background definition in the style sheet. I suppose I could have just not given the section object a style, which would eliminate the need to change the background, but that’s okay, because now I know how to change an object’s background when it’s different than the body background.

Next, I will work on making the transitions between colors less jarring by writing a nice function that will blend colors.

iTunes Album Cover Art

nancy_rosewood_cover

Build album cover art for my friend Nance’s 1991 solo acoustic EP.

Background layer is a simple repeating pattern of a wood texture I grabbed from image search. Above that layer is a wood-textured cube, also snagged through image search. (This one clearly has copyright issues, but nothing that can’t be quickly salvaged by an iPhone and a trip to Ikea.)

I am testing out new tools. I used to use Photoshop and Freehand, back when there was Freehand. I’m unhappy with Adobe’s subscription model, so I use Pixelmator (which I absolutely love) and I’m trial-ing Affinity Designer. Affinity’s skew tool is a little wonky (and took me an hour to find because it’s so well hidden) but I expect I just need to fiddle with it some more. Anyway, the perspective is a little off on the rotation and skew of “Rosewood” but this was good enough for the intended use.

I spent the rest of the morning digitizing the audio from a cassette tape into Audio Hijack and editing that into MP3s with Fission.