Barack Obama came to my church today to give his testimony. I was able to fire off a few pictures of him with my cell phone’s built-in camera, but as you can imagine, the quality was a little less than spectacular. I want to be able to post these to my MySpace page, but they need some serious work before I’ll be satisfied enough to show them off. So here’s a few easy steps to quickly tweak your cell phone photos.

First, open up your picture in Photoshop. Click and hold the Eyedropper Tool until the tool’s option window pops up select the Color Sampler Tool. Move the Color Sampler tool over your image until you find the darkest black in your image (Tip: the Info Palette displays the corresponding RGB values for the pixel the Color Sampler Tool is hovering over. To select the darkest value in the image, look for the lowest RGB reading in the Info Palette. 0 is the lowest value for any RGB output). Click to set the value which will appear on the info palette as RGB #1.

Next we want to select the whitest white in the image. Using the Color Sampler tool again, find the lightest white value in your image. In the Info Window, light colors will have a higher RGB reading - 255 is the highest value for any RGB output. Click again to set this value which will appear as RGB#2 in the Info Palette.

Now to correct the color of the image. Go Layers>New Adjustment Layers>Levels and then click OK. You should be looking at the Levels dialog window now. Change your channel from RGB to Red. Enter the R value from your RGB#1 reading top left box to set the image’s black point and the R value from your RGB#2 reading in the top right box to set your white point. Now you can use the sliders to fine tune these settings to your liking and hit OK.

Flatten the images next Layers>Flatten Image.

Now let’s sharpen the image a bit to add a little clarity. Choose Filter>Sharpen>Unsharp Mask. A good place to start with sharpening a photo is Amount - 120%; Radius - 1.5 pixels; Threshold - 10 levels. Every photo is different so feel free to adjust these settings to your liking for your photo.

And finally, it’s time to sample different color variations. Go Image>Adjustments>Variations. The resulting window will show you several different color variations of your image, from here just pick the one that you think is best.

Heres my final product!

It may not be as good as a pic coming from a hi-res SLR camera with a good zoom lens, but it certainly looks better than the original!

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Saving your work periodically is just smart working practice. There are times when things out of your control will go wrong and your computer will go down. Nothing is more frustrating than working on a project, whether is a Word document or the next greatest thing to come out of Industrial Light an Magic, and your computer crashes… Or you leave your desk and someone else closes out of your project without saving for you. Losing fifteen minutes or four hours worth of work can really make you want to either pull your hair out, or just drop the project all together.

There’s no worse feeling that knowing you’ve got to start a project over from scratch. Thankfully, there is a quick way to save yourself at least some headache when these events occur.

Most applications now have a built-in autosave feature. While this is a great feature to have, it won’t do you any good if the project hasn’t been previously saved. To take maximum advantage of autosave, you must save your project first. A rule of thumb we practice at the studio is to save our projects first before we do any edits or begin the design process.

Open your application, set whatever parameters you need to set for this project such as document size, color space etc. and then save your project where ever you would normally save your work. Doing this will activate the autosave feature in your application (providing that there is an autosave feature built-in). Most programs will autosave every five minutes or so, so if your computer does happen to crash or something else disastrous occurs you’ll only be out about five minutes work instead of the whole project.

Working smarter, not harder… And keeping all your hair

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Not enough can be said about the importance of archiving… For any one in any industry that involves the use of computers and sensitive data.

Personally, I look after hundreds of business logos, advertising pieces, databases, websites and photo assetts… not even including my own personal work. If I didn’t have an effecient way to archive my assets that allowed me quick and easy retrieval, I’d probably spend more time looking for art than actually working on the project. Or even worse, if a computer were to go down in my office, I’d be in a little more than a serious bind if I didn’t keep good backups.

There are several great ways to make sure you never permanently lose anything you’re working on, however it’s frighteningly suprising how few people actually implement some sort of archiving system. I can remember talking to a screen printer who called me regarding artwork I’d done for him about a year prior. One of his clients wanted an exact reprint of that job and he was having trouble finding the artwork. When I asked him how he kept track of past jobs, there was silence at the other end of the line. After probing a little further, I realized that my printer friend had no means of documenting what art went with each job, or any type of digital storage system.

Archiving is easy, and it’s like insurance. Sure it’s a pain to while you’re doing, it’s not much fun, but when (not if, when) something goes wrong, you’ll be covered and back in the driver’s seat in no time.

These systems can by complex, involving specialized software and dedicated computers and expensive media, or as simple burning your important info on a CD or DVD.

For my small home office, I employ a more simple set up involving an organized folder structure on my main computer, and external hard drive and a collection of CDs and DVDs. I keep a single folder for all my Studio’s Work in Process (WIP), one for all my financial data and one more for estimates. At the end of each month, I move all completed jobs from my WIP folder to another folder on my external hard drive, aptly named “Archives.” In this folder is a series of folders named by the date they were added. So at the end of this month, I’ll create a new folder in “Archives” named “January 2007,” and add the completed projects to it.

To add a level of redundancy to system, I then burn a copy of the new archive folder to CDs or DVDs, whichever is more appropriate, and label it according to its contents. That CD then gets cataloged in an neat little utility called DiskTracker, after which it lives on my desk until I need to retrieve any artwork from it.

DiskTracker is a simple cataloging system that keeps track of all files on a CD or DVD and allows quick searching for accurate and easy lookups. Simply open the volume you want to search (in my case, I organize my volumes by year - 2004, 2005, etc…) and do a search for whatever piece of art or information that I’m looking for. Once it locates the art, it tells me exactly which CD it’s on.

Simple, easy… essential for business. And all this setup cost me was the $30 for the software are $75 for an external hard drive! There are plenty of upgrade options from a system like this that include varying levels of automation, as well as multiple hard drive RAID configurations with mutliple levels of redunancy. If you have questions on implementing an archiving system for your business or organization, drop me a line. Can you really afford not to have some sort of archiving system in your business or organization?

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