Getting your scanning right - aspect ratios
After writing last week’s post about messing around not doing stuff, I felt pretty stupid reading it! This is a good thing. Not thinking I’m stupid – it’s best not to get into that sort of habit. But that whole ‘FFS just get on with it’ annoyance with myself. If anyone’s actually reading this, they must be having a right laugh as I overthink everything.
So, back to work!
Finished descriptions for the first three pieces and eventually figured out how to add size and price, since the instructions had an older version with everything in a different place.
All good until I tried to specify the print dimensions; I wanted A3.
After putting in width it kept changing the height. I changed it back. It then changed the width.
Define the problem
I’d read some article on aspect ratios long ago - too boring and complicated for me at the time. Ha. So I dropped a quick email query. Darn, I was right. In my defence, I was shown how to crop scans before saving them…so I did just that for a few to remove excess white space, blissfully unaware that the ratio was now messed up.
When you don’t yet know what you don’t know, you do stupid things like that.
Fixing the problem
So I had to crop each scan. I tried to format using Word. Yeah, I know. But I don’t have Photoshop and my old but trusty laptop isn’t up to that sort of thing even if I had a clue how it worked.
Unsurprisingly, that was a no go. Each image is huuuge so Word couldn’t even show it.
No probs. Copy into Paint and crop, right? Nope. Paint didn’t recognise .tiff so I couldn’t use that either. Hmm.
I’m also tying myself in knots trying to figure out how to know what the correct height and width should be to match A3 aspect ratio.
Brilliant on line tools I found
A great site for an excellent explanation of everything is https://www.scantips.com/basics01.html, but here's the bare bones I learned:
All paper ‘A’ sizes have an aspect ratio of 1:1.414
If your height and width don’t match that ratio, you can’t print in any A size – it will just chop off the extra.
You need an online calculator which can work out the missing detail (not all calculators will do this – many are just for video and camera formats if that's what you need).
It’s all about pixels. Dimensions i.e. H or W are measured in pixels and the combined total image area is measured in megapixels.
I used this wonderful tool to solve my problem. I input the pixels for the width of each piece and told the calculator I needed the height to correspond to 1:1.414.
Then I did the same thing but inputting the height of each piece to get the correct width.
As the width reduction required was less than the height, I placed an A3 tracing sheet over each painting to see which side could take the reduction.
Now, how to actually do that?
I vaguely remembered some wonderful person (I love you!) mentioning a free image editing suite called FastStone. Checked out their instruction pdf and saw it would crop right down to the individual pixel level so I installed it and got set up.
Took a bit of doing – those large files again – but in the end, I had edits which now (hopefully) were the correct ratio.
Time to upload them to the Hub and hope I haven’t just wasted four hours of my Saturday afternoon…aand it worked! Yahooo!
Lesson learned (another lesson). That took a lot of time and money spent on the scanning doing things I will not be doing again and more time on my laptop trying to find a way to fix it and applying the solution!
It'd be nice if it had ended there but one of the images got messed up somehow and wouldn’t load so I had to re-crop it and do the whole listing crap all over again.
Finally I ordered one of each as a test. Phew.
Update: They arrived in two days flat and they look great. I chose Hahnemühle Pearl paper which shows really vibrant colours and has a nice (very soft) sheen to it.
I preferred this to the much more textured alternatives and it works well with the acrylic on canvas. I'd use the other ones for mixed media work though.
Over to Shopify
Found their short instructional videos helpful. Will just use it for the website until Instagram gets a bit of momentum aka I get used to taking more pictures as I work. I also found they have a policy generator so you select the ones you want and just cut and paste to your shop. Handy.
Prints from the Hub sync automatically to the shop so the next job is setting up the actual template and configuring payment options and so forth.
Easy peasy - not
This whole e-commerce shebang is touted as being as simple as downloading a couple of apps and a few clicks and after a couple of hours designing your site, you can be selling your work.
Snorts in disgust. Yeah, and the rest of it.
But hey, through all this I’ve learned:
Some basic functions of a Mac
A valuable lesson in scanning, resolution and file sizes
Aspect ratios and why they matter
Found a great site to calculate aspect ratios. Helpful, as my canvases are either 16x20 or 12x16 – neither are A3 ratio. If I want to do acrylics then I need to tweak.
I now have an image editing tool to take care of the resizing.
How to set up a simple Shopify site
How to write better product descriptions
This week's hard earned wisdom
Here’s the thing, we often put off starting new ventures because we don’t know how to do stuff. But even if you don’t have a handy expert to call on, you can likely go to the web and find a resource to explain what to do.
And once you’ve learned something, it gives an immense sense of satisfaction - and the next thing you have to learn doesn’t seem so bad.
As adults we get so used to being competent and knowledgeable in our jobs and home life that struggling for mastery or understanding throws us back to being a helpless child, and as adults, we don’t enjoy that feeling of being bumbling and useless at all.
It’s what stops many people from trying something new, but if we can approach learning with eagerness, it changes the dynamic. To see what new ideas we can grasp, what skills we can learn, what unexpected aptitudes we can uncover and then realise that as adults, we have many more learning strategies and a life time of experience to bring to the ‘classroom’. It makes the whole thing less a daunting task and more of a treasure hunt.
What are we going to find in our box of hitherto untapped potential?
What are you telling yourself you 'can't' do? But what if you could do it? What then...?
