Helga’s Heartlines: A Journal

Wednesday, July 11, 2001

Newmarket, Ontario.


My armchair-critic, philosopher-friend, to whom you were first introduced in “Return of the Daughter of Joy”, is a marvel as far as I’m concerned, a wonder of wonders. He’s so cool and logical and capable in situations where I become sentimental, emotional or inept. I think you already saw evidence of this. Not only does he critique me but this guy is technical too! Oh, boy! I’ve been meaning to ask him for quite a while to fix my photo-logo, the one that I’ve been using on all my articles. I’m sort of recognizable given the minuscule amount of space allotted; the problem seems to be my image has been over-compressed.

Well, let me tell you we had fun straightening me out! Hope you have fun following how “we” did it....

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E-MAIL COMMUNIQUE BETWEEN HELGA AND RICHARD, HER MENTOR

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HELGA: Here I go, Richard, ‘pushing the envelope’! While you’re playing with Pollyanna, (for the above-referenced essay) do you think you could work on my face? Do you think you could massage ‘Sweet Thing’ (his file name for my face) so she wouldn't look so distorted on my published papers? Do you mind? See what you can do? Once you’ve successfully massaged the image, please send it to me. I believe the max is 3KB.

RICHARD: ‘Pushing the envelope’ is good; it’s the only way to grow. I’m always "pushing the envelope" with you, Helga, and I believe in reciprocity, so no problem. Will try to improve your photo image--I’ll work on it this evening--Are you sure it’s 3KB and not 30 KB?

HELGA: Oh yeah.

Next afternoon’s e-mail:

RICHARD: Bad Helga!
I’m irritated with you because I spent about 8 hours trying to get larger, clearer pictures that fit the limit of 3 KB! Since you work with numbers every day, I trusted you to take numbers seriously! You failed to check the actual limit because you relied on logic. But logic sucks unless cross-checked in some other way. Relying on logic instead of reality is like the ancient Greeks who argued about the age of a horse based upon logic instead of "looking in the horse's mouth". Since you don't understand computers, you should check the facts in the clearly published guidelines instead of relying on what you think is reasonable in an area you know nothing about. The site says they permit 10KB not 3KB.
Apparently they have a program that just puts a "thumbnail" up. The distortion is due getting a thumbnail of a file that is already highly compressed.

HELGA: Oh dear! I'm so sorry, Richard! Please accept my apologies. I swear I've seen 3KB somewhere, sometime...when I've tried to download my photos. Please don't spend any more time on it, then. All right?

Following morning’s e-mail:

RICHARD: Sorry about the outburst. I want to thank you for helping me learn more about my software.
I set the compression to zero, which got rid of the distortion. I set the pixel size to the max (60) allowed at the site and raised the resolution.
My research indicates that the pixel size seems to determine the picture size so this reduces the picture size to about an inch before feeding it to the monster at the site. Now, I will play with the compression to see what happens.

HELGA: Sounds good!

Afternoon e-mail:

RICHARD: How about these? Feedback please!

HELGA: NO, NO, NO, Richard! You've done this to me before! You insist on changing my face! I start to wonder if you like the one I've got! My face is shorter and broader than the way you have it. A Germanic-looking face. If you can't simply DOWNSIZE the EXACT photo I sent you, which includes my entire head, wide cheekbones and chest, lets leave well enough alone. I hate to tell you, (Sweet Thing) the distorted one, looks better - more like me.

Helga hates to hurt people’s feelings...sends follow-up e-mail:

HELGA: Dear Richard, Sorry, if I sound overly critical. I know you're going to a lot of trouble. Please forgive me. I guess I can only say, in my defense, every lady is sensitive about her face. I think the problem is that somehow you are elongating my face by cutting off the top of my head. Thus I am out of proportion.

RICHARD: With a one-inch-square picture, if I include your hair, your face shrinks to a half inch. If I include your neck and hair, your face shrinks to a quarter inch.

HELGA: All I know is the photo I sent you is correct in all aspects --

RICHARD: Except clarity & quality.

HELGA: - Hopefully you can simply make this picture smaller...If not, don't worry. I'll stay with the one I’ve been using.

E-mail response shortly arrives captioned: “Making Helga Square or ‘Helga the Square’”.

RICHARD: Hmmmm...Interesting technical and artistic problems that help me become a better graphic artist:
The first problem:
I have never seen you; all I see is about fifty revisions of you, most of which are too wide, too narrow, two blurred, too distorted, too large or too small.

2nd problem:
The 60 by 60 forced pixel size gives a square picture.
But your head is taller than it is wide if I include your hair. (Including part of your lovely neck makes the problem much worse). The dilemma is that to make a square picture, I have to cut off the top of your head or else make you too small so that there is wasted space on either side of your head.

Third problem:
Every "save" looks different from the original because I set the 60 by 60 pixel size constant when I make a save, and the forced pixels change the way you look before the save, or else make you about a half inch wide.
Solution: Send me an excellent, square-picture of your face.
Your face should fill a one-inch by one-inch frame with no wasted space on the sides.

HELGA: The wonders of technology! It boggles my mind! I don't have anything else to send you right now. I really like the picture I sent you. You created it! (Thank you, once again, BTW). I use it as my logo. I can live with it, as is, if there's no way of improving it. It still looks like me, more or less. Without space around my face any picture would look unnatural. I mean you can only take the description 'square-head' so far!

RICHARD: Please send it again or a better picture.
After all this time the photos you sent me got lost in with all my revisions. Your originals may have been deleted along with the revisions that also have very poor quality.
Your face in your lying on chaise picture (see Helga’s web site) looks good if your body is included to give context. On the other hand, taking your face out of context, when you are lying down, makes you look strange: if I kneel a foot away from you and take a picture while aiming up at your chin, you will look like the "attack of the 50 foot woman". If I trim the picture to just your face, your face will look like what we see when we look up at the great heads at Stonehenge!
Need a clear, square picture of your face; not a long, dim picture of your whole body lying down in the sun, with your face in the shade at the wrong angle!
Why not have a digital photo shop put a square picture of your face on a floppy disk so you can email it to me?

HELGA: I love the original picture! The angle is fine!
It's a little bit coy, which is sweet, hence the name. It's obvious I'm looking up shyly or squinting slightly against the sun. Perfect.
Except for the slight distortion when it's downloaded it looks the way it should in my articles. I should have space around my head, not just a square of my face. I don't want to be square Helga.
Anyway here it is again...You originally sent it to me months ago when you created it.
The one we called ‘Sweet Thing’. Please, just fix the distortion not the size or proportion of the image, if you can.

Here comes some results:

RICHARD: Here is 'Sweet Thing 2' without distortion and within the rules of 60 x 60 pixels. The picture would be much worse if I didn't take off the extra layer of hair I had put on ‘Sweet Thing’ to show you what more hair would do for you. Your first reaction was "too much hair" but later you forgot that I put it there and took it as your own.

HELGA: NOT TRUE, Richard! The original ‘Sweet Thing’ was perfect. "C'est moi!" You go take a look at me on my chaise, with ALL my hair. ‘Sweet Thing’ is a close up of that photo. The hair including parting and crown is exactly the same. That's what I want if you can do it. A close-up of me with all my hair. (This is not the one with the hair you added! - That one had me with a longer face and more hair on top, as if I was wearing a hat!) Please see the result, including background produced on my article. That is what I want, just less distorted, otherwise identical. If you can't fix it, PLEASE, forget about it. I prefer me distorted. It's still me!

Richard, ‘Sweet Thing 2’ is closer to what I want but it's a smaller size than the one in the article, and part of my hair is missing. There I really do look like square-head Helga! PS Don't drive yourself nuts with this, please, Richard. I'll keep me as I am.

Here come some more results:

HELGA: Richard, these would be great, they're almost right, BUT you changed my face again! Take a good look at ‘Sweet Thing’ - Really scrutinize her. Her bangs and eyebrows are different. So is her nose and mouth. ‘Sweet Thing’ is ME!

Dear Richard, I think you're trying to make me more perfect than I am!
But I can live with it - me. I prefer myself as I am. Especially if I'm using me as my logo.
Sorry...Please don't spend any more time on it. Please.

RICHARD: Don't worry: it pleases me to increase my skills. I don't know why you want me to stop learning how to be a better photo editor? Are you afraid I will get angry if you don't like the results? Are you uncomfortable to have someone give you a gift? Especially a gift you don't like?

If I can be a difficult mentor when you write, you can be a difficult client as I learn more about photo editing. The strategy seems to be: start closer to the size you want, keep the file size below 10 KB, and hope they let more pixels through.

Think of yourself as a movie star and myself as your make-up artist. I got rid of the effects of compression: fixed your leprosy-skin-problem :) and put some powder on your face. I also fixed the way your left eye had gouged out part of your nose. Here is the result: Ta Ta (drum roll please)....
PS - Its OK if you don't like it; I had fun making it anyway.

HELGA: Richard, you do deserve a drum roll! It's the real ‘Sweet Thing’ - ME!

RICHARD: Glad you like it.

Here they are, Helga, for your edification:

My Photo-Editing Secrets

Photographs of beautiful women are typically a little out of focus to make them softer. In contrast to pictures of macho, weight-lifters are "hard edge" and show every popping blood vessel.

Eyes need a dramatic hard edge with a lot of contrast but female face-and-neck skin needs a soft glow. The problem is that if you soften the contrast and take away the "hard edge" to make the female skin look good, then her eyes look dull and lifeless. If you use a hard edge to make the eyes look bright and alive, then the skin looks like it has a disease. My secret is to treat your eyes and mouth different from the rest of your face and neck.

The way I do this is to make four duplicates of the picture, then erase everything except one eye in the first two duplicates, and everything except the mouth in the third duplicate. The fourth duplicate is use to make the skin glow and look healthy. Then I have three projects: eyes, mouth and skin. Each project gets different treatment.

I assume that the reason your eyes have invaded part of your nose in the old pic is that the parts did not fit together perfectly. The new pic corrects this mistake.
But in the absence of an original picture of you, for all I know, this is the way you look.

I do not have a visual memory in the sense of being able to see anything in my mind's eye. I can recognize what I see, however. But my visual memory is barely adequate; I have to see someone many times before I can pull them out of a line up of similar-looking people. Since I have taken your picture apart and put it back together dozens of times, it is unrealistic for you to think I remember the lost original, except in a very general way.

The old pic is not an original, but one I have worked on long enough ago to forget the details. So send me original pic some time in the future. Then I will have a more accurate basis for comparison. Right now all I have is many variations on each of your various parts. These parts can be put together in various ways to build several hundred variations of Helga.
When you tell me that something I built is "the real you", that is good feedback. When you tell me it is "not you", that is also useful information. However I can't tell the difference between:
1) Distortions created by compression and my constant fiddling.

2) The lack of perfection of how you really look (Unknown by me).

So while feedback is good, please don't assume that I don't like the way you really look, since I have no original pic of you and can only guess how you really look when you put on some make-up and get ready to go out.

HELGA: Richard, would I be right in saying, “We've both had a lot of fun with this!”
Your comments crack me up! I'm not kidding.
I laughed when I wrote mine.
You must have laughed when you wrote yours.
Thank you for fixing me up!
Think I'll keep you as my photo editor.
And editor/critic.
If I ever become successful and financially solvent as a business concern, I'll employ you as a consultant...
So, maybe we need to keep on working on this. Helping Helga become Herself Incorporated.


~ Helga Marion Ross ~

Copyright 2001