Bill Bryson: An Example

You could read that title in a lot of ways, actually. I’d definitely say he’s an example of good writing. But we’re concerned today with making an example, not following one.

Having spent the morning going through pictures for the documentary, I have to take a moment to gush about Photoshop. My father used to do web design for the paper, and I had an opportunity throughout most of my childhood to play around with the program, which is a piece of high-powered graphics editing software. (I think I squandered that opportunity by mostly using it to create an entire line of trading cards featuring the 1995 lineup of the Atlanta Braves that I planned to market one day. Somewhere along the way, I lost interest — probably because I was maybe ten years old — and they’re now stored on a Macintosh computer so old and dead that its hard drive should probably be put to work as a doorstop.) Anyway, what I’m trying to tell you in a roundabout way is that I haven’t touched Photoshop in years, and I’m in the throes of realizing it’s a pure masterpiece, even for someone who’s going to need it as little as I am for the project.

I thought about writing a few lines about all the neat filters and effects you can use in Photoshop, but that would take too long, and besides, we’re in the Internet, so we can do something a bit more fun. I’d like to take you — mostly because I still have 20 minutes till my laundry dries — through a brief example.

I’ve scanned a page from a book by one of my favorite authors, Bill Bryson’s Notes from a Big Country, which I bought for the plane ride home, and didn’t really need thanks to an exceptionally chatty seat companion. Anyway, with most of the scans I’ve used, I’ve gotten them out of books, which means they come out a.) completely facing the wrong direction, often at a diagonal; b.) close, sometimes alarmingly close, to large blocks of text that I won’t need to use; and c.) faded, as they’re photocopied images. See below; I’ve blacked out the text for copyright reasons.

Now, the picture we’re trying to grab is the one I’ve put in a red box. There are obvious issues — first of all, it’s facing the wrong way. It’s also flanked by both title and text, and if you look closely, you can see the ghost of the writing on the back. If we want to put this into a documentary, we’re going to have to make all of these things right. Some of them will disappear. Some of them will change position, or direction.

We start by grabbing the picture and turning it 90 degrees counterclockwise. With Photoshop, this takes all of three and a half seconds. And since we’re going to need just the image, we’ll bump it up in size, too — it’s saved at a high resolution, so this is even easier than the last step. And before you know it…

… we’ve got the thing right side up, which is a prerequisite to pretty much everything in life, from walking to graphic design. There’s still that problem of lettering in the background, and things could use a little cleaning up, but that’s a job for someone with more than 10 minutes to put to it. Nevertheless, we’ve gone from a picture that seems almost irretrievable to something very workable. After years of using Paint to cobble together images (that’s the only program I had for the map of England on the itinerary page), Photoshop is nothing short of a godsend.