we started a new type of morning art activity at work, which is "stream a movie and then pause every once in a while for everyone to do a 5 min composition study together". so far we are like 20 minutes into blade runner 2049 (one of my faves!) and will probably be doing these for the rest of the week and then some 'til we finish the movie

hardest part is managing level of detail w.r.t. the 5 min time constraint. second hardest part is trying to correctly eyeball the placement of everything in the still image. even though i specifically matched my canvas' aspect ratio to the movie's, i swear my canvas doesnt look wide enough. its like dealing with an optical illusion... very distracting

i also need to figure out a better solution for exporting and collating these frames. if i was using photoshop itd be trivial to export all the layers/groups out all at once by selecting them and doing a right click -> export layers, but im using clip. next time im gonna try and use the animation system so i can easily export out an image sequence, but im not looking forward to dealing with the animation timeline. as for arranging them onto one image, im not even gonna bother figuring out an independent solution and im just going to use photoshop's file -> automate -> contact sheet ii.

the toughest part about trying to remove photoshop from my workflow is that ive spent over 2 decades working in it so im extremely familiar with its many obscure features 😔 i dearly miss smart objects, layer comps (personally i use the frame timeline for this functionality), how it treats layer masks (a grayscale layer you can colorpick transparency from / step inside to edit in isolation and paste stuff), and probably like a zillion other small things i bump into. the layer mask thing i relied on soooo much it was such a huge loss for me when i moved to clip. but i simply did not want to continue paying to use photoshop on my home computer