It seems Toolmonger reader Schnaars is a man cut from the same cloth as I am — we both use Photoshop for everything. In this case he used it to spec a chair that his Other Half saw in a catalog. We saw his story and had to post it.
I hate to pay for things that I’m pretty certain that I can build. This chair for example. My wife loves it, but it didn’t look too complicated to build. (I’m about 1/2 finished and I’ll post photos shortly)
I was able to get the general dimensions from the catalog, but wanted to get specifics like arm length, arm height and the height of the feet. Photoshop to the rescue.
I just dropped the photo of the chair into PShop, scaled it something easily divisible by the actual size (6″ = 36″) and then leveraged the guides to see where things really go.
If you don’t have PhotoShop, PowerPoint offers a similar feature.
Try it out
Try it out indeed, sir. After seeing it in the pool Bill Schuller, another regular to the site, helpfully suggested doing a similar breakdown with Google’s Sketchup program, which is just about as a good a method as you see here. We love to see this kind of stuff going down — hats off and beers up to you both.
Toolmonger Photo Pool [Flickr]
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3 Responses to Woodworking With Photoshop
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There are plenty of free/opensource alternatives to the Adobe Suite.
Nothing against Adobe at all, their products are great, just expensive as hell.
The Gimp, Photoshop alternative
Inkscape, Illustrator/vector alternative
Scribus, InDesign alternative
Open Office has a great PowerPoint alternative, and whole office suite.
As a user of Linux, OSX, and Windows, it is nice to have a set of free, powerful, usable apps that work the same on every system.
I saw Schnaars’ post also, and it’s a great method. I’ve used Visio for making plans for a long time, and it works well for this too. Since I’ve recently started working with Sketchup, it’s good to know that this is possible with that too.
I was about to type the same message as below. But you can refer to below to find what I was gonna type…
We used to do this sort of thing all the time to be able to draft and render buildings in Architectural School (before I failed out for liking the rec center more than my studies…)
One other note: If you really want to make a ‘model’ you can use Sketchup (Available for free from Google) to do 3d modeling really easily, its very simple and intuitive and there are a ton of videos on YouTube that are tutorials. And you can import photos, and then 3d model on the same screen, basing a model off of a photo…