Not Much To Report

I haven’t really done anything terribly productive today.
I did go out and get a haircut, and do some grocery shopping, but beyond that? Nothing, really.
I’ve spent most of the day messing around in Photoshop testing out different techniques for enhancing/restoring images.
Why? Well, in my constant search for reference images I often find pictures that I really like, but that I can’t actually use because they’re tiny and low-res, with lots of JPEG artifacting and whatnot.
So if I can find ways to edit the original images to get them to a point at which I can actually use them as source material for drawings, that would definitely be a plus.
(In particular I have a low-res, heavily shadowed screen cap of Scarlett Johansson that I would love to draw – and have tried to draw many times – but it just doesn’t have enough detail to work from.)
Beyond that I’ve been attempting to restore some deleted files on one of my external drives, files that I just realized that I needed today – mostly image files, but some documents as well – and then remembered that I’d deleted a while back when I hadn’t realized that I would one day need them.
I’ve tried a couple of undelete utilities, but they all get to about the 80% mark in scanning for recoverable files, then crap out. I figured that this was due to some bad sectors on the disk, so I did a scandisk and set it to attempt – which is the keyword – to repair bad sectors, and it came back and said that it had fixed the errors, but the undelete utility crapped out at the same point again. I’ve just run another bad sector repair utility, and now the undelete utility is chugging away yet again. This time it found one more recoverable directory than it had in previous attempts, and it’s also making a shorter estimate as to how long the scan will take, so I’m hoping that’s a good sign.
If not, oh well. I don’t really need the files, I’d just like to have them.
(They’re mostly sketches and unfinished pictures, which I thought I had backed up somewhere else.)
I decided I’ll (probably) mow tomorrow morning. So there’s something to look forward to.
I’ve been looking at some business card printing sites, as I’ve been thinking about printing up some Heroic Portraits business cards so that I can leave them lying around in public places the way evangelists who aren’t bold enough to actually evangelize leave Chick Tracts lying around.
I meant to do some work on some more sample Portraits for the Gallery today, but got too caught up in the whole undeleting thing and the photo enhancement stuff.
Other than that it’s been a pretty quiet day here at Casa de Threshold.