Saturday, March 20, 2004
Cleaned the shower. Brunch in the back patio at Zazie: Eggs Italie (tomatoes and basil) with potatoes and toast for me; Un, Deux, Trois (one buttermilk pancake, two eggs, three pieces of bacon) for Patrick; large orange juices for both. Bought a new cutting board and split wire loom at Cole Hardware. At home, installed some of the wire loom to organize cables leading to Patrick's computer. Patrick and I spent all day at home working on Lodestar, during which I got a lot of practice using the Distort tool in Photoshop to create a 3-D image of a book. Here's how I learned you should do this: scan the cover, spine, and top or bottom separately. Arrange them on separate layers in Photoshop so that they all have one corner touching. Choose a layer, select all, then use the Edit > Transform > Distort tool, set the proxy (anchor) to the common corner, then grab lines only—not the handles—to distort (skew, really) the layer. Repeat for each of the layers. For my image, the book cover had a proxy of 1 and a vertical skew of -15 degrees. The spine had a proxy of 9 and a vertical skew of +15 degrees. The top I moved manually into place, but the transformation was: proxy of 7, width 104%, height 38.9%, -15.2 degrees, horizontal skew of 60 degrees, vertical skew of 0 degrees. Snacked on popcorn. Dinner at home with Patrick: shrimp and organic refried black bean quesadillas with corn and yellow bell peppers. Been listening to the Shoutcast stream of club977.com lately.