Oh wow it's Friday already!

Unfortunately, printing in colour is really, really expensive, so for the thesis publication, my editor and I agreed on a reasonable number of colour plates. Which means that there are quite a few colour illustrations that have to be converted to grayscale, since I just kept all colour pics for the submission copies. So most of yesterday was spent converting colour figures and pictures from my thesis to monochrome pics while making sure that the important details stay discernable.

Picture editing work is half exciting and half mind-numbing. The same processes and checking files for the same things over and over again makes it mind-numbing - but tweaking contrast, brightness and gamma curves for best results has to be done for each pic individually, so it's nothing for a batch job. Sometimes the details come out even better in the monochrome version - that is when it gets really exciting - while sometimes it's a battle you can hardly win. Because I knew that not all would transfer nicely to monochrome, I checked first - there should be enough colour plate for all the really difficult pics in addition to the pictures that I want printed in colour for other reasons (like, usually, exciting colours on real garments).

So... I made good progress with the conversions, though there are still quite a few left to do. Good thing my thesis has only four hundred and eight pics!