Jeff Tranberry's Photoshop Crawlspace

November 15, 2005

Monster-In-Law

I admit it. I created a monster. A Photoshop monster.

My father-in-law retired from being a professor of limnology at the University of Minnesota a year or so ago. He begged me for a copy of Photoshop. So like any good son-in-law looking to score points with the 'rents, I obliged.

That's where it all started. Now it's grown into a small cottage industry.

I think the original intent was to work with photomicrographs. (see my post about Photoshop @ Work: Scientists and healthcare professionals)

Seeing the power of his new 'toy,' he thought it'd be fun to restore old photographs. He's got drawers and drawers of old film and slides, some of it 35mm, some medium format, some even on glass slides. OK, we need to get him a slide scanner. Say $500. No, he needs one that does medium format. It's gotta be Nikon. (Did I mention he's a Nikon zealot?) Make that $3000.

Now that he's working with larger files, the old PC just isn't up to the task. No problem. New Mac, new Cinema display. Roughly $3000.

This is so much fun! It'd be great to replace the old Nikon SLR with a brand new DSLR. Throw in some new lenses and other gadgets. Let's call it $4500.

Whoop-dee-doo. Now he wants to print some of these images out. Enter a new Epson printer and reams of paper. Now we need more ink!

At this point: father-in-law = happy, mother-in-law = what's the opposite of happy?

Actually she's not really mad, but she does give me a little grief. But hey, it keeps him off the streets, right?

To his credit, he's really doing a lot with the application. He's restoring beautiful pictures he took with his Rollie on a scientific expedition to Iran in the early 60's. He also has amazing photos from Glacier State Park in Montana he took in the 50s. Many of the slides were awash in yellow. Seeing the old guy work with the tools to pull color out of these ancient images nearly brought a tear to my eye.

He's also uses his new digital camera voraciously during his winter long stay in Mexico.

Did I mention he takes a lot of pictures?

Excuse me, I have to order some bigger hard-drives...

October 13, 2005

Let's Blog!

Blogging. Everybody's doing it, right? So, let's do this thing!

I'm Jeff Tranberry and I'm a pixel junkie going way back to MacPaint. I have the Mac SE I bought in 9th grade with money I earned delivering papers to prove it.

I work on the Photoshop development team as Quality Engineer - Product Lead. So, what the heck does that mean and what do I do?

In short, I'm the luckiest guy in the world. I get to help design, play with, and try to break the next version of Photoshop before the rest of the world does.

I've been working on Photoshop since version 7.0 and have worked on such features as "Layers," "User Interface" and "Smart Objects." Prior to stumbling into the best job ever, I was a Flash and graphic designer at Olson Advertising in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

I still live in Minneapolis and work out of Adobe's Arden Hills office. Some of you are familiar with John Nack, who's a fellow midwesterner. Although John now lives in San Jose, he and I both enjoy representin' the midwest, or the "MW," as we like to call it.

My goal with this blog is to provide informative posts on things I find interesting and useful - covering Photoshop, Photoshop scripting, photography, graphic design, and anything in between. Hopefully, I'll get to meet a lot of you, and learn from you, our customers, in the process.