|
A serendipituous
chance
After convening the committee and organizing the class of 1980's 20th
reunion in 1999 & 2000, it started to become clear to me that there
was a lot of good that could come from the web site, and from all those
people re-meeting each other.
Scanning
for scanners
As I was having this thought, I noticed that Megan S. had brought the
1980 class picture to the reunion. I asked if I could borrow it,and she
very kindly agreed. I didn't even have a scanner at the time, so I carefully
drove it to an office where I knew someone and asked that they scan it.
The scan eventually turned out to be of too little resolution, so I scanned
it again myself, in a scanner I had bought by then.
Months
of Photoshopping work
The picture was so wide it had to be scanned in two pieces, and then
I stitched it carefully together. Because of natural aging, the picture
had lost a lot of its color, in spotches. A big pink area over here, a
narrow greenish splotch over there, and four big vertical creases that
totally obliterated many faces. I resolved to do the best I could, and
for many months I spent much time fixing lips, eyelashes, naturalizing
distorted faces, re-coloring sweaters, and color-correcting all the many,
many splotches.
Robbery!
Someone just
up and took the picture off my web site. Apparently they seemed to think
that just because someone else (other than me) had used one finger to
push the "Scan" button, that they had the right to steal all
my work in obtaining, caring for, transporting, re-scanning, and months
of Photoshopping the picture. Some people. You know?
Karma
I advertised
online asking for someone to sell me their copy of Adobe Acrobat, so I
could apply security and web links to the picture. I met this very nice
guy who, without knowing me from Adam, just up and decided to give me
his software for free, and out of the blue threw in a color printer. His
karma points went sky high that day.
The final
step
After all that toil and trouble, the last step was here - producing a
master source file, which turned out to be about 500 megabtyes. After
post-processing, the final product ended up being only a few hundred K,
with the biggest version being around 1 meg.
And here
it is!
1980 Class
picture - Small PDF File - 2365 x 800 ( 396 k )
1980 Class
picture - Large PDF File - 4731 x 1600 ( 1.1 Meg )
|
+
=
