Desktop picture

Good old GG1 #4896, my computer desktop picture (“wallpaper”). (Photo by the so-called “old guy” years ago [‘70s] with the Pentax Spotmatic.)

I spent the better part of yesterday afternoon (Monday, May 11, 2009), and last night, trying to recapture my desktop picture.
My desktop picture is good old GG1 #4896, a locomotive I saw many times, and went through, but only photographed once.
Anyone who reads this here blog, knows I consider the Pennsylvania Railroad’s GG1 electric locomotive the greatest locomotive ever.
I have a slew of scans of my one-and-only 4896 print, probably seven-to-10.
For some unknown reason, one is razor-sharp.
I suppose it’s an old scan from eons ago, as any I’ve done since were a little fuzzy — and prints deteriorate.

A little ‘pyooter-image instruction:
Scanning at low resolution renders an image-file that can’t be blown up. Blow it up and it goes all jaggy.
I had resized the razor-sharp scan down to 72 pixels-per-inch and 5.6 inches wide by whatever for a blog story, but had apparently kept the original scan.
I tried scanning the print again, at increasing resolutions; first 300 ppi (pixels-per-inch), then 2,400, then 3,600, and finally 4,800.
The drill here is if I had enough memory to process such a monster; my previous rig didn’t.
It would start doing the virtual-memory shuffle.
But this rig has 1.2 gigs of memory; so it swallowed it.
A 72 pixels-per-inch image only 5.6 inches wide, blown up to monitor size (10’ X 16’) goes all jaggy and woozy.
Which was why I was rescanning at higher resolutions — I couldn’t use the pik I had in the blog; too small.)
But everything still looked fuzzy, even at the higher resolutions. And at 4,800 everything took so long it was unbearable.
Finally, I happened to stumble on my razor-sharp original, buried deep within a folder on the hard-drive partition for my previous ‘pyooter, and it was 144 pixels-per-inch, but 26.056’ X 17.208’; fairly large.
I opened that, and did a few Photoshop Elements® tricks, namely brightening and lightening shadows.
That I “saved-as” “desktop.jpg,” so I know my desktop pik next time.
It also was saved on my desktop, although I coulda saved it any old place.
My razor-sharp original was not written over; it still exists. —I ain’t overwritin’ that!
Apparently OS-X does things in the background, fiddling for desktop display.
I had 4896 on my old 9.2 desktop, but ya had to allow for stretching-to-fit. Apparently OS-X avoids that, or I don’t click stretch-to-fit.

So, back to setting my desktop-picture; I chose my “desktop.jpg” file.
Back to good old 4896 as it was before, razor-sharp. I guess somehow it got to reading the 72ppi, 5.6 (5.597) X 3.694 file.

RE: “‘Old guy’ with the SpotMatic.......” —My macho, blowhard brother-from-Boston, who is 13 years younger than me, calls me “the old guy” as a put-down (I also am the oldest). The “Spotmatic” is my old Pentax Spotmatic 35mm film camera I used about 40 years, since replaced by a Nikon D100 digital camera.

I have been a railfan since I was a child. As a teenager I lived in northern Delaware not far from the Pennsylvania Railroad’s electrified New York City to Washington D.C. line, now the Amtrak Northeast Corridor. At that time the locomotive Pennsy mostly used was the GG1; and most I saw were doing 90-100 mph.

“Rig” is my personal computer (‘pyooter), an Apple Macintosh.

When a personal computer runs out of memory (“RAM”) for doing a process, it can start using “virtual-memory,” open segments of the hard-drive. Doing so requires a slow and tedious process, which I call “shuffling.”

The fact the image was “26.056’ X 17.208’” (rather large), made it expandable despite a lowish resolution.

I use “Photoshop Elements®” as my image-processor; not the full Photoshop®.

“Save-as” makes an additional file, separate from the one you opened. By “saving-as,” you don’t overwrite the file you opened — the original.

The “desktop” is what appears as your computer display. You can save to that, or some other place in your computer.

“OS-X” and “9.2” are Apple computer-operating systems, OS-X the most recent.