Another Unfortunate Event, Which Means Another Lesson Learned

Today’s fiasco happened like this. My book cover image is 8k by 4k. It’s 280MB sitting on my iPad. I don’t have a backup. That’s just insane. Last week I wanted to grab just a section of the image for a blog post. I cropped the image down to show only the title text. I exported the Procreate file as a jpeg. The killer error occurred when I forgot to undo the crop. Once I closed the file there was no way to restore the original file.

Today I opened my cover image to place it into my Ingramspark cover page template. That’s when I realized that only the cropped image existed. My original cover image, with all of its layers, is officially gone forever. I’ve spent hours trying to recreate it using bits and pieces of jpeg images, png images, and even some psd images. It’s turned into a Frankenstein monster, and I still have work to do.

But, I’m not going to work on this any more, at least for today. It’s now family time, and I’m looking forward to having a snack.

Today’s lesson is: Don’t get cocky; don’t get lazy; just back everything up…all the time.

Example image that needs fixing

I’ve mentioned many time that I created many images with faulty dimensions that don’t work well in the e-book format. The picture of the Magic Moustache Bus is a good example. When I brainstormed and drew this image, I knew I wanted a wide picture to accommodate the bye bus’ impressive length. But I didn’t even consider how it would look when squeeze into an e-book page.

If I expand the image so that it’s full length goes from the left border to the right, which I plan to do, there’s a blank gap at the top. This image needs more height, which I create by using Procreate’s surprisingly useful cloud brush.