Yesterday afternoon while watching the hapless 49er's get by Arizona and poking away on my computer, I created my usual annual calendar for the coming year of 2008 now a bit more than a month away. The above is a crop from part of that image. Thought the process might amuse some of you Photogs here. The link to the full calendar is on an obvious sub-page link at my below homepage that also has instructions. Thus a marketing freebee for personal use for web users visiting my site.
Once the file is downloaded onto a person's hard drive, there are simple instructions on the su-page to print out the 2000x1500 pixel image for a 10x7.5 inch at 200ppi print. The background image captured with my little Coolpix 7900 is Mono Lake at dawn on October 9th this fall from the US395 scenic viewpoint south of Conway Summit. That morning had exceptionally clear air without any clouds with strong dawn colors.
Building a calendar each fall is a rather pleasant process I look forward too. Since I have strong Photoshop skills going way back to 3.0, I prefer to make my own versus the many canned "make yer own calendar" applications available. I peruse my images from the year, looking for something colorful with considerable open sky areas that text will display against crisply. Always the most fun part making that choice. After selecting a base image, I'll Photoshop process then downsize it to fit within an ordinary standard 8.5x11 sheet with landscape orientation. Use 200ppi print sizing that provides a reasonable resolution for text on a calendar. There are many Interenet sites providing yearly calendars. I just copy and paste such calendar text into Notepad since that is already set for Courier one needs to keep the alphanumeric characters lined up evenly in columns. Then edited that in Notepad so months are sequential vertically with spacing of text adjusted for easy copying and pasting into the Photoshop Text tool for input atop the image. After getting all the month text in individual month layers atop the base image, I spent a lot of time moving them around, changing the font size, evaluating how it looks this way or that, and tweaking the font colors so the text stands out nicely.
The source I plucked the calendar text from also had all the moon phase days each month and holidays, so incorporated that too. For the moon phases, I copied those tiny figures onto my clipboard using the freeware MWSnap screen capture program and then pasted them into their own file with a transparent background. Thus was then easy to select any of the four black phase figures and paste them in four per each month beside the specified days. I then link merged all the many moon phases layers pasting them into one "moon" layer. Thus ended up with .PSD file with the base image on the background, 12 month layers of text, one moon phase layer, and one layer for the 2008 year and business name text.
...David
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