Stereoscopy revisited

This last weekend, I had another go at 3D Photography, using the method detailed in another posting, but actually getting it right this time.

As before, I selected a bunch of my models (Masterpieces Starscream and Megatron, Alternators Rumble and Ravage, along with my custom Soundwave) on the usual flat white background. Paintshop Pro makes this sort of thing a real trial because it doesn't seem to allow position adjustment to specific channels the way Photoshop does, meaning I spend however long nudging one channel over by so many pixels, then so many more, only to find I'd been nudging in the wrong blasted direction (or with the wrong channel). It's a pain, but I live with it... Perhaps PSPro does allow the sort of fine tuning I need, and I haven't discovered how just yet. I have precious little time to investigate.

The end result, on screen, is pretty darned good. I used Megatron as the mid-ground, Starscream and Soundwave as the background, with Rumble and Ravage in the foreground. I also emailed the final image to myself at work, and today I printed it out.

Well, blow me if the printed result - even on our next-to-no-tonal-range (to be fair, because it's not properly calibrated) HP Colour Laserjet - isn't ten times better than the on-screen version. I'm half tempted to cheekily squeeze in a high-definition inkjet print via our large-format proofer... That would be stunning. I could frame it...

Eventually, I want to do this sort of thing with something other than a plain white background... but that's some way off yet.

In other news, Boss paid a visit on one of the other offices today with Publishing Director (yes, my employers make up job titles on a regular basis. Probably because it makes it easier to later make people redundant if their job title is meaningless). The purpose of the visit was to view a new system we may be using to make life easier in Production. Boss and I had already seen it last tear, but Publishing Director wouldn't hear of it. She had to see it with her own eyes. That, and she seems to believe the company didn't exist before she arrived.

She's not entirely keen because, at £30k per year, this system may necessitate a certain trimming down of staffing levels (personally, I reckon we could easily save that much by, oh, getting rid of a Publishing Director, maybe?). She doesn't want this as she 'developed' a 'system' of running Production that would split the department in two and give each of our designers two magazines to work on in their entirety, with three designers (and therefor six magazines) per team. Buying in Expensive Software should, theoretically, mean that we could drop a designer or two, as the workload would be dramatically decreased (assuming the clients buy into the opportunities presented by Expensive Software). Dropping a designer or two would mean we couldn't work in two teams, and couldn't distribute the work evenly as two magazines per designer.

And that's not the only promise she wouldn't be able to keep to Production.

"Welcome to the wonderful world of Look Before You Fucking Leap," says I. The single most important thing she should have learnt during her witch hunt earlier in the year was that the company has promised much, and utterly failed to deliver... Soon enough, she'll realise she'd just started to live down to everyone's expectations.

In other, other news, it's my mate Paul's birthday today. I meant to deliver his present yesterday, but had a splitting headache. Couldn't reach him today as he'd taken the day off work and left his cellphone off. If I'm lucky, I'll be able to deliver it later in the week... if not, at the weekend, after visiting the London Expo... At which I could, conceivably, find his Christmas present. Hurrah!