You can extract images, as is, directly from a PDF file, in Photoshop. I knew it had the ability to open a PDF and turn into a rasterized image, and that has been helpful from time to time.

But, try this:

1. In Photoshop, Go to File->Open, and select a PDF with images in it.
2. You should get an "Import PDF" dialog box, with options for how to crop the page, resolution, and so on.
3. In the upper left, you should see radio buttons to select pages or ... HMMMMMM ... images. Choose images instead of pages, and suddenly your cropping and sizing options are grayed out. But you will see a list of all the images embedded in the PDF:
   

Isn’t that hunky-dory?

Pick an image from the list, and press 'OK'. You will open up the actual image embedded in the PDF. This is why the options are all grayed-out—you aren’t changing anything about the image.

Now you can work your evil ways on that l’il image. Oh no, don’t thank me.

If you just want to see the completed poster, you can find it here. Otherwise, read on.

Drew Emmitt is a Colorado native, part of Leftover Salmon, and someone whose music you’d think I would know better. A local favorite tune he wrote with Leftover Salmon is "Gold Hill Line," for crying out loud. But I didn’t really know his stuff. So first I picked up his new album, Long Road, and started listening. (it is really good, by the way)

The distinctive shape of Drew’s mandolin became my inspiration for a poster. Somehow I wanted to take that shape and, I don’t know, carve it in stone, paint it, something. I searched for pictures, found one to trace, and that was the beginning.

And then I started looking at the paint peeling off the fence outside my window. And I had my idea. I drew a grid on some large sheets of paper, and taped them up to the fence:

Then I searched for a photo that gave me a clear shot of Drew’s mandolin, and traced it in Illustrator.

The perspective needed tweaking, so I experimented with the shape on its own to find the right feel:

I exaggerated the lighting levels of the fence picture so I could find the grid lines, plotted the points in Illustrator, and overlaid the distorted grid with the mandolin shape:

The grid allowed me to distort the vector art until I had an image which looks funny straight on, but, when shot from the correct spot (gaff tape on the concrete marking the points of the tripod, tripod locked in lowest setting—the marks stayed there for weeks). I printed this and then used it as a guide to draw onto the paper on the fence.

Then I really got to work. With a utility knife, I carved the distorted mandolin shape out of the fence, and then stripped the paint back, leaving the peeling paint in the shape of the mandolin.

Finally, I had an image with the composition I wanted. The diagonal line of the fence and the mandolin shape gave me dynamic areas for type, and the whole image had a nice, laid back late summer afternoon feel. Just right for the Faire.

It was time to work on the type. I had considered carving letters, but that seemed plain crazy. The simple mandolin shape had already eaten up most of a day in carving alone. So I found other ways to go crazy. So I drew some letters on paper, and then traced them in pen to clean them up:

I thought they looked so-so, but a little cheesy. Not really that tight yet. So I traced them in Illustrator, straightening and cleaning things as I went, adding flourishes, and skewing the type upwards a bit to fit better into the poster:

After dropping the type into the poster, I thought the type had gotten too sterile, so I printed out the type, and then—madness beginning to really show here—re-traced the inner and outer lines of the letters with a graph pencil.

I then scanned that back in, and did clean up work in Photoshop. I had to find the solids:

The lines needed some clean-up, but they had the roughness I wanted:

Finally I took the type back into Illustrator, used the Live Trace feature to trace the art, and I had my tight, clean, dirty, rough letters. Smmmokin!

The poster was looking pretty good, but lacked a little oomph. The lighting didn’t quite feel right. And the mandolin didn’t really stand out as much as I had expected. I ended up scraping off more paint to make the shape more prominent, and then I had another idea.

I had occasionally been using my iPod Nano as a flashlight, flicking a button to see my way down the steps. What about using that with a long exposure on the camera? This might look really cool.

I also have a solar hanging lantern with 6 yellow LEDs I got from my sister a few years back, and I brought it into the mix in different ways:

All the setup. Might as well take more, experiment:

AAANNNNNDDDD some more. Oh - looks like the moon’s coming up. I think we’re done.

Now remember, all of these shots were taken from exactly the same spot, and I never changed the zoom. So I was able to stack them up in Photoshop, set each layer’s transparency to lighten, and experiment until I had the right blend of images. Dang, looks like fire’s coming out of that there mandolin!

I put it all together and proudly showed it to Mark Zaremba, who had commissioned the poster, and who had final say. His first take: "This is wicked, but, um, Drew Emmitt doesn’t play heavy metal!"

REALLY?!? I thought I was done. But, he was right. So I tried a few more things:

"It’s still ... just ... creepy," Mark told me, after some experimenting. "The trees are just not friendly. You’ve got to put in a nice sky."

So, finally, I had to do what I really did not want to do: cut out the fence in Photoshop.

That, a decent starry sky image from somewhere, and a LITTLE MORE WORK, got me to a more friendly glowing mandolin image.

And finally, we were there.

Phew.

At this point, I'm using the Raw HTML plugin, so I can write in HTML. I don't really want to write in HTML, but it took me 20 minutes to get that last post working correctly. I've been working on design stuff, not the mechanics of simple writing, apparently to my detriment.

This is almost as bad as, ahem, Microsoft WORD. I'm just saying.

It has rough edges, but it was time to get this site out into the open and let it breathe.

I started exploring how to re-do the old site in May, 2007. Wait, as I check file creation dates, it looks like I first created some sort of comp in October 2006! Ideas were kicking around, but I wasn't making any headway. And when my 20-Year High School Reunion was popping up in August '08, I just didn't want to show my old site, so I whipped out a very basic "interim" site showing a few portfolio pieces, which I figured would be there for a couple of months, and I'd get my shit together.

‘Life is what happens to you when you're busy making other plans.’

—John Lennon

Well, it took a little longer than that.

And at the end, am I happy? Well, SORTA. No, not really. I want to re-work already. At least I hope that the framework will allow changes on the fly a lot more, you know, like a website.

Anyways, there we have it.

More to come soon, I hope :)

At any rate, this version of the site has been taking forever to come to fruition. Since it was taking a while, I thought it might be good to start writing articles when I can, such that when the new site goes live, it seems—ta-da!—as if I am, instead, a consistent blogger, or at least someone who has more to say than just, “look at all my work!”. (But while you’re at it, look at all my work!)

In essence, I wanted to give my site a little back story.

Like this?

A Little Back Story

I am out of shape. I sit at the computer too much, and I don’t exercise like I used to. One weekend in March 2006, I decided to build a rock wall in our garden. I lifted about a ton of rock over the course of two days, and then went back to work in the garoffice on Monday. All week, I worked long hours, ignoring warning signs that I had overstrained my back until Friday, when Erika asked me to bring some warm water to the front, where Anna and Iddi were splashing in a kiddie pool. I walked out with perhaps 3 1/2 gallons of water in a bucket, and could not make it all the way before having horrible pain which forced me to immediately set the bucket down, lie down on the ground, and cry out in agony. And thus began some serious back trouble.

Foolish, foolish Jeremy. Don’t do this.

No, not that kind of back story. Just a sense that I have something to say, and have HAD something to say, all along.

But it won’t take long to figure out that I’ve written a lot less along the way than I could have.

Part of my problem is that I get distracted easily when I’m writing. To be an effective designer—hell, to be an effective anything—you need laser focus. Right?

But: I dashed off the first part of this message last week in Mail while my browser was reloading. It got buried as a draft. I got it into WordPress this morning, and since then, I have:

• marveled at the exquisite sparkling column of air over the new snow in the low morning sun,
• pondered whether anyone else had worked on an idea I had last night for a project to create something like text-wrapping form select elements,
• found an interesting article on customizing form select elements which wasn’t quite what I was thinking of (hey, maybe my idea will be new! perhaps useless, but new at least…),
• followed a link on that blog to a brilliantly written essay exhorting me to respect my client’s brands by not “tramp-stamping”—and now I think I won’t—this perspective makes me realize why I should not do that,
• followed another link from the same blog entitled You totally missed the mark: the first 6 months of freelancing, also interesting,
• noticed that the air now has less sparkles, and that I should stop my Thursday morning writing and get to work,

… and still not much of a back story!

So, maybe you’ll get back story on this site, or maybe not.

But pretty damn soon, I have to get this thing live.