October 3, 2010 11:58 pm

Back To The Grind

:note: Corpse Bride DVD

Today was my first day of my last term and I am exhausted. I can already tell it’s going to be rough, but I am thanking my lucky stars that I only have school where I will be taking asynchronous implicit bias courses (and my minimal work schedule) to deal with this term. I can’t imagine being one of those people who work 60 hour weeks and then take three classes  to try to graduate sooner. I met someone today that did that exact thing last term, and good lord I do not know how he was still alive talking to me.

Sooo… apparently I was a bit mistaken about my GPA earlier, as I received a letter Saturday informing me that it was actually a 3.8 for last term, and I have been named to the Summer Session 2006 Dean’s Honor Roll. Yay me!

I learned something new about Photoshop today. Never, ever use the Brightness/Contrast palette. It basically wrecks your image. Try opening a photo, and then open your Histogram window, and then test out using the brightness/contrast while checking out your histogram. See all those vertical gaps? Not good. Learn something new every day. I also learned how to “properly” make a PDF out of a Word document. You go to File :arrow: Print, and check “print to file,” choose “Adobe PDF” as the printer, and go to – either properties or advanced, I don’t remember – and UNcheck “don’t export fonts for PDF.” Then hit okay, and it’ll have you save some weird file extension. Do that, and then open Adobe Distiller and drop that weird file extension into it, and it will automatically create a PDF for you. Seemed like a lot of extra work to me, that’s for sure, but apparently that’s the “proper” way to do it, according to one instructor.

Commence freaking out. I will be done in less than three months. EEP.

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3 Comments

  • Claire says:

    Congratulations about your grade – I’m not really familiar with this honour roll malarky, but it sounds like a good thing, so well done!!

    :grin:

  • Elea says:

    Congrats on making honor roll and going into your last term!

    Hmm…so what you recommend in place of brightness/contrast in Photoshop then?

  • Meggan says:

    Thanks ladies! :D

    Um, apparently you open the Levels palette by creating a new adjustment layer for Levels, and… um, I may have to write a post about this. Basically, you pull in the slider tabs on either side so they line up with the ends of the flat ends of the histogram (like the top picture on this page). This apparently sort of adjusts the light and dark “ends” of the histogram so they correspond with the actual light and dark points in the image.

    Gah, I think I have forgotten everything I learned that day. Erm, in short, avoid brightness/contrast and use levels instead. It’s just better for the image, I guess. B/C is sort of the “auto” way of doing it and levels is the “manual.”

    That was a really poor explanation, I’m sorry. :P I thought I had a handout about it but I can’t seem to find it.