DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

MoveOn sent me an email claiming The Day After Tomorrow is “the movie the White House doesn’t want you to see.”

That’s just dumb. It’s clear to me that the folks in the White House are naive, or deceitful about the dangers of global warming, but do I think they really care whether I see the latest Hollywood blockbuster? Um, no. I think — well, I hope — Bush & Co. are thinking about Iraq and the economy and national security, and not about whether I go see some celluloid fantasy about tidal waves and icicles.

I think MoveOn has done an amazing job of engaging citizens in the political process, and I hope they never stop. But this, in my opinion, is a misstep; they’ve apparently overlooked this important lesson from history. I’d rather they go a day, just one day, without emailing me about some damn perceived emergency or other, than bother me about a movie. Sheesh.

Seen in Open Exchange magazine: sekrit decoder logic for produce stickers.

Those annoying little produce stickers have a special purpose other than pricing at the checkout line. Want to avoid genetically modified fruits and vegetables? Don’t purchase any with stickers containing five digits starting with an 8. Want to know if your produce is organic, grown without the use of pesticides or synthetic fertilizers? Look for stickers with five digits starting with a 9. If the sticker has four digits it simply means that the food was commercially grown, neither organic nor genetically modified.

So, those stickers — which are annoying as hell — actually serve a purpose. I ransacked the fruit bowl for examples: lemon, mango, apple.

I found that our avocados are “conventional.” See the 4-digit code at right.

I couldn’t find any genetically modified produce. I’m sure we buy it sometimes, and it probably looks nicer than the organic stuff, which is often smaller and bears visible imperfections. But hey, at least the organics cost twice as much!

The Chronicle is running “Carroll Classics” during Jon Carroll’s extended vacation. Today’s column, originally printed in January 1992, is one of those that seems to have been yanked directly out of my brain, albeit with clearer prose and fewer icky fat cells. The essay expresses a thought I never realized I’d had until I read it.

It’s mostly about marriage, but it’s also about everyday life: the spaces between the stuff you remember.

He called it Love’s arrow, time’s arrow.

I remember, as a younger person, looking at older couples sitting at restaurants not saying anything to each other. I can remember thinking it looked like some existential hell.

Heh, it’s about youth, too.

Yesterday’s image of a dirty solar panel was enhanced for dramatic effect. In the original shot, the “wash me” message was scarcely visible.

Photoshop provided the vehicle to my salvation. I’ve been using the program for more than 10 years, and except for those times I discover I’ve just blown an hour on a correction, I really enjoy using it. I’ve created a new debris.com channel for Photoshop trickery, to show off some of the things I’ve learned, and populated it with some past articles. There are more to come.

The challenge with the “wash me” image was to radically increase the contrast between the dusty surface of the solar panel and the ever-so-slightly darker surface where I’d wiped a message into the grit. But a simple application of Curves — normally enough to gain contrast — was insufficient.

After fifteen minutes of fiddling in Lab mode, I came up with a workable solution. I’d realized I needed to find the image channel with the highest existing contrast. There are 10 channels to every image (RGB, CMYK, Lab), so I checked them all. Cyan was the best.

I copied the cyan channel and pasted it back into the document as a new (grayscale) layer, twice. An aggressive curve correction to each brought out the contrast: one was optimized to show off the left third of the image, and the other for the middle. There was no saving the right third; the ‘H’ in ‘WASH’ is basically invisible in every channel.

These two correction layers were multiplied together, then applied to the background layer using Pin Light mode. A gradient mask was applied to the right two-thirds of the layer accentuating the left third of the image, so as not to blow out the extreme right side. I adjusted the opacity sliders to balance the blend of images, and followed up with a global curve correction to bring the colors back to reality.

Did I know what I was doing? Not really. I knew I wanted to increase the contrast between two points that had not much space between them. I knew that “there are 10 channels to every image” from the color-correction bible. The rest I made up.

The result makes it look like we’d had a dust storm, which is not the case. But this was the image I saw in my mind when I snapped the picture.

Sun Power has done extensive research and has consistently seen that clean panels produce 8% more than thase panels that have accumulated dust from the atmosphere. For this reason, we suggest that you wash down your panels at the beginning of the summer. This is as simple as hosing them down with plain water.

Ours were indeed covered with grime. Simply hosing them off didn’t do the job, either; I made a pass with a clean scrub brush to knock off the grit.