That’s right!  To celebrate the launch of our new website, we’ll give you $20 off the Totally Rad Action Mix through this Friday 5/9/08 with the coupon code totallyrad5508.  Just enter that at checkout and save!

Also, we’re giving away $500 in Apple gift certificates to one Rad Photographer in a drawing this week.  To enter, all you need to to is download a sample set of three Totally Rad Actions from the Download Sample section in the new site.  We’ll announce the randomly-chosen winner here next Monday.  Good Luck!

Perhaps that’s a bit lofty a title, but it sure feels like it for me… Today we finally launch the brand-new Totally Rad Stuff For Photographers site at www.gettotallyrad.com. Some new goodies, and a super-bitchin flash interface. Head on over and check it out!

There’s yet another great new resource for getting the most out of the Totally Rad Actions (well, it’s a small one right now, but it’s a start).  Go to www.gettotallyrad.com/forum for a whole slew of troubleshooting tips, quoted from emails I’ve answered in the past.  I don’t have any plans for making this an active community for photography discussion (Jeff Caplan does wonderful job of that already), rather a place where some of the problems and solutions I’ve helped people out with can be accessible to everyone else as well.  Enjoy!

More super boring news! I’ve grouped all the recipe cards that we had at the tradeshows into a neat little gallery where you can view all nine of them! The TRA recipe cards are a great way to learn about the actions and what they can do. Nine different photographers, along with their photos and how they processed them, are all there for your educational pleasure!

Check them out at www.gettotallyrad.com/recipes

Not very exciting news, but I’ve grouped all five video tutorials into one place so they’re a bit easier to find… www.gettotallyrad.com/videos

So in case you’re looking for them, now you don’t have to go sifting through pages of old blog posts to find them. More videos are on the horizon, too…

This is a snippet of what my world looks like right now… only took a day to get back in the saddle with the projects I had put off since last November, but now that conventions and workshops are behind me for a while, it’s time to make some better Photoshop tools.  Believe it or not, I actually like this kinda stuff.  Little chunk of code from a plugin I’m working on… And this, my friends, is what you have to muck around with if you aren’t getting far enough with just actions…

void DoFilter(void) {
// a, b coordinates, and the offset between adjacent pixels in the a and b dimensions
double _a, _b, aOffset, bOffset, burnFactor;
// only works for 8-bit images this way…
uint8 * pixel = static_cast<uint8 *>(fr->outData);
uint32 rectHeight = fr->filterRect.bottom - fr->filterRect.top;
uint32 rectWidth = fr->filterRect.right - fr->filterRect.left;
aOffset = (1 - (rectHeight * 0.5) / (rectHeight * 0.5));
bOffset = (1 - (rectWidth * 0.5) / (rectWidth * 0.5));

fr->inRect = fr->outRect = fr->filterRect;

// fetch some data - moved this down to the processing loop
//    *gResult = fr->advanceState();
//    if (*gResult != noErr) return;

// start kicking some ass
for (int16 plane = 0; plane < fr->planes; plane++) { //process planes
SelectPlane(plane);
*gResult = fr->advanceState();
if (*gResult != noErr) return;
pixel = static_cast<uint8 *>(fr->outData);

…

…

…

Minor news, but it took a while to get up and running… so if you want to know what I’ve been up to for the last few days, here you go:

We have a new cart for Totally Rad Photographers - when you buy the actions, you’ll have a new, slightly prettier experience awaiting you… the major good news, though, is that instead of waiting for a download link (which sometimes never arrives because AOL or Yahoo, or whatever, decides it’s spam, and just tosses it out), you can now get your download link immediately via the Your Account link on the top right. Just one of those little ways we’re constantly trying to improve the customer experience here…

Also, you’ll notice some minor changes over the next few weeks as we switch from being just the Totally Rad Action Mix, to being Totally Rad Stuff For Photographers… I’ll let y’all speculate as to the meaning of the change…

Finally, another minor but geeky change I’ve been working on is moving the Totally Rad Stuff over to a new server, with its own SSL cert, and its own domain name - www.gettotallyrad.com. That was part of a little gear shifting we needed to accomplish before putting the pedal down on some new projects. All boring stuff. All necessary stuff. And all done now, so I can get back to kicking ass. We’ll have some big news in a couple weeks (fingers crossed)…

So it’s been a few weeks… Vegas was an ass-kicker!  We basically had 9 solid days and nights of non-stop talking and drinking.  Between the Anti-Workshop and the WPPI tradeshow, we barely had a spare minute to eat, let alone relax.  Chenin’s blog and John’s Blog both have great recaps of the workshop, and have ample links to the online journals of many attendees, so I’ll mostly skip the workshop talk and let you read all about it there!

The WPPI tradeshow really drained us… since we’re new to doing tradeshows, and since we don’t have any friends inside the organization, we basically got the last possible choice of booth, which was in the back corner of the “Venue Booth” section.  Basically, this wasn’t the tradeshow per se, but a collection of small booths outside the main ballrooms where the bigger seminars were.  The hours, therefore, were super wacky.  We had to be in the booth by 7:30, stay till 11, then go somewhere else till 4, come back, and then stay until 9:30.  That’s basically like a 14-hour day with a long lunch break.  All I wanted to do when I got home was sleep…

But of course, I promptly came back, surfed for a couple hours, and caught a cold.  All the Vegas air, drinking, talking, and generally abusing my body for 10 days was fine… two hours of germy water pushed it over the edge.

And before I even THOUGHT about trying to accomplish any real work, I had three days of office cleaning to do… my work area had become so messy, cluttered, disorganized, and generally disheveled after months of storing a tradeshow booth next to my desk, that I literally couldn’t get anything done.  So I rented a 7×10′ storage space, and gleefully filled it up with all the crap that we don’t want but can’t part with, most of which was sitting in piles around my office chair.  The gals at the storage space were starting to get on a first name basis with me…

Then AFTER that, I had to deal with some ecommerce drama, which I’ll tell you about in the next post…

Meanwhile, I’ll just leave you with this photo of the bathroom of the Double Down Saloon in Vegas.  I don’t know why…

Just a quick note to say we’ll be off to Las Vegas for about 10 days for the Anti-Workshop, and WPPI, where we’ll have a venue booth at Bally’s (come say hi!)

If I’ve been slacking on the blogging lately, it’s because I’ve been doing a lot of menial things to get ready for this week, and haven’t really had anything interesting to share… Things like designing a new backdrop for our booth (ooh!!) and updating 500 slides worth of material for the workshop (aaahhh!), and modifying our cart to accept PayPal (wow!)…  Lots of cool goodies on the way once I get back, though.

Hey - I like getting these because I think they’re funny, but my wife doesn’t get any spam… could you send her a few scam letters, too? She’s feeling left out. Send em to chenin@boutwellstudio.com as well. Thanks! I really love these emails… quality stuff!

Dr. Johnson Michael wrote:

From Dr. Johnson Michael
Tel:+447031914271
fax:+447014216900
I am Dr.Johnson Michael From Harlsden, North West London , here in England. I work for Natwest Bank Corporation London. I am writing you from my office that will be of an imense benefit to both of us. In my department,being the assistant manager (Greater London Regional Office), I discovered an abandoned sum of $12.5 million USA Dollars (Twelve million five hundred thousand Usa Dollars) in an account that belongs to one of our foreign customers Late Mr.Thompson Morrison American citizen who unfortunately lost his life in the plane crash of Alaska Airlines Flight 261 which crashed on January 31 2000, including his wife and only daughter. The choice of contacting you is aroused from the geograpgical nature of where you live,
particularly due to the sensivity of the transaction.and the confidentiality herein. Now our bank has been waiting for any of the relatives to come-up for the claim but nobody has done that. I personally has been unsuccessful in locating the relatives for 2 years now, I seek your consent to present you as the next of kin /Will Beneficiary to the deceased so that the proceeds of this account valued at 12.5 Million Dollars can be paid to you. This will be disbursed or shared in these percentages,60% to me and 40% to you. I have secured all necessary legal documents that can be used to back up this claim we are making. All i need is to fill in your names to the documents and legalise it in the court here to prove you as the legitimate beneficiary. All I require now is your honest Co-operation, Confidentiality and Trust to enable us see this transaction through. I guarantee you that this will be executed under a legitimate arrangement that will protect you from any breach of the law. Please,provide me the following: as we have 5 days to run it through. this is very very URGENT PLEASE. 1. Full Name 2. Your Telephone Number 3. Your Contact Address. Having gone through a methodical search, I decided to contact you hoping that you will find this proposal interesting. Please on your confirmation of this message and indicating your interest will furnish you with more information. Endeavor to let me know your decision rather than keep me waiting.

Regards,
Dr.Johnson Michael
Tel:+447031914271
fax:+447014216900
Email: dr.mjohnson1@hotmail.com