I spotted this man walking around in front of the old Post Office in Luckenbach Texas a while back. He would stop from time to time to strike a pose for the rest of the tourists. It seemed amusing at the time, given that everyone in Luckenbach is projecting some sort of image. He fit right in. The crowd is always a diverse bunch, from well heeled wannabe bikers to outlaw country music enthusiasts and of course tourists.
The dime novel narrative surrounding my subject was already there, all I had to do was make it visible. The text is a combination of sentences I wrote myself and a paragraph from an actual dime novel, The Untamed by Max Brand, published around 1919. Max Brand is surely one of the great marketing names of the twentieth century. Of course given the context of his work it may well have been a reference to a permanent tattoo on a horse. No matter, it is a wonderful name for a western novelist.
The West we know from popular entertainment is a wild exaggeration of larger than life characters and their dastardly or heroic deeds. My subject personified many of those stereotypes at least in my mind. He made a turn of the century dime novel impression of rugged individualism with impeccable style cues.
Social SecurityThis Social Security document photographed in 2014 was taped to the wall of a rural post office that closed in 1974. It had been hanging there untouched and probably unseen for forty years. During that time it had weathered to the color and texture of parchment. The found image is composited with the portrait of a man in his mid-eighties.
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A couple of weeks ago I wrote a post about my Photoshop automation project for generating single page photo calendars. Phototrice includes a new calendar every week as part of our regular Friday Photo feature. Actually two calendars are produced every week with North America and international weekday formats. Creating two calendars a week is not all that labor intensive but creating two calendars fifty two times a year is something worth automating. The coding on the calendar generator was completed about a week ago. I used it to generate last week’s Friday Photo calendars without a hitch.
This project was put together using Visual Studio 2015 and VB.Net. As mentioned in the last post, external automation provides many more options for integrating functionality that cannot or should not be scripted to run directly in Photoshop. Of course this approach limits me to running under Windows but that is what I use anyway. Future projects will likely be coded in JavaScript or ExtendScript to make them platform independent.
The application GUI is quite simple. I can enter all necessary information and kick off the generator which is about all that is required. A SQLite database is used to store various kinds of information for the generator. Right now configuration and logging data are the primary items stored. Eventually it will contain all information and images required to create any previous calendar. This will be useful for my yearly compilation of calendar images in book form.Calendar Generator GUI
The application lends itself quite easily to other uses where templates and dynamic data are combined to produce finished documents. Right now I’m working on a series of custom postcard templates which will also use the generator. Table driven configuration allows for great flexibility in layout and template selection. Coding was done using normal object oriented techniques. This allows me to extend or repurpose functionality as necessary. Calendar generator configuration table
This is the first time I have created code to script or automate Photoshop. I have learned some very useful things about how Photoshop operates by analyzing the API model. That information gives me insight into how to accomplish various tasks with or without scripting. The experience of writing code for Photoshop has been good overall. The documentation is accurate and detailed which is not always the case many application API’s. I expect to build other useful scripts in the months ahead. Hopefully I can make scripts available on Phototrice at some point. Anyway that is my goal.
