meddlingBanter

So I’m at work late right now scanning about a thousand pictures.  See I’ve put off looking for a real job for a long time, several factors are involved there, but mostly I’m just lazy.  Last week the owner of the company I work at kinda gave me the hint that I need to get off my ass, make a resume and find a real job.  To compound that he has assigned me the job of scanning and organizing all of their company photos for the past 30 years of business, more on that later.  In an effort to get a real job and actually make money to live on, I’ve taken my boss’s advice and put together my resume and am starting to look for a real job, since they’ve out grown my usefulness around here.  I guess considering this was only supposed to be an internship for the summer, and I’m still working here I have been lucky.  Plus I’ve been able to build up my resume with the additional projects I’ve worked on.  Now that I’ve been reduced to office lacky I suppose its about that time to get going from here. 

The scanning though has actually been kinda fun.  We don’t have the best scanner here at work, well not the best scanner for scanning in thousands of photos.  The document reader blows for photos, either adding huge white bars on the sides, scanning in sideways, or adding flares to every photo it scans.  That leaves me with the flatbed.  I started scanning individually, but that took forever so I decided to read the scanner docs and find out if there was anything I could do to make things easier.  A couple hours later, configuring the shitty HP scanning software and I was able to scan multiple photos and then crop the photos individually with relative ease.  Today though this didn’t suit me so I started to look at photoshop, maybe that could lead me to an easier time.  I found out photoshop has a crop and straighten fucntion built in, perfect for what I was doing.  All you have to do is import a set of photos from your scanner, say three, the max I can fit on the scanner bed.  Photoshop imports those photos to one file, then just click on crop and straighten and you get three individual files.

This led to another problem though.  Photoshop was saving the files as PSDs, so I needed a way to convert those PSD files to JPGs.  Saving each file indivually would take forever, which again wasn’t what I was looking for.  I did a little googling at that point and figured out you could create things called actions in photoshop.  Wow, those are time savers.  So basically I recorded an action of me saving one file as a JPG with the setting I wanted.  I then used photoshops batch function to apply my Save to JPG action on all the files I had open. 

After all that and learning about actions I created a few more actions that when clicked would scan in the next set of photos, crop them, and close out the file I cropped the individual files from since I didn’t need them anymore.  Pretty slick and way useful when I do projects like this in the future of my own at home.

Unrelated to that Abby’s doing some HDR photos for one of her classes and sent me her first HDR photo (not finished) so I thought I’d post it here for all the world to see.