Photoshop is hard

I've gained a newfound appreciation for those who do Photoshop magic.

Tonight I was intent on making a new Facebook cover photo, for whatever reason. I didn't know it would take six hours to complete.

Without further ado, here's the "before" pic:

...and the "after" one:

My goal here was to make a fake Netflix screenshot from "Barefoot Contessa." I achieved it through the following:

  1. Using the Wayback Machine to search for the source of the GIF (a blog called Food Network Humor, from the early 2010s)

  2. Relentless googling of any association between Ina Garten and that dumb Blackberry she's holding

This led me to another post on Food Network Humor from May 2009, which talks about an episode of "Barefoot Contessa" where, surprise surprise, Ina calls her friends up to help with some dinner for Jeffrey.

The episode in question? Why, it's "The Big Chill," from season one of Ina's "Barefoot Contessa: Back to Basics." In the sage words of Mrs. Garten, "How easy was that?"

The answer (in case you like answering rhetorical questions), is "not so much." But I digress.

Now that I found the episode, all I had to do was take the screenshot and add a caption to it. Simple enough.

Again, not so much — I had to buy the episode. I did so on iTunes. And, will you look at that, iTunes doesn't let you take screenshots. Great!

After some research, I finagled a way to convert one minute of the episode so that I could take a screenshot of that glorious closing shot. I was getting somewhere. Finally.

The last piece was getting the caption to look, for lack of a better term, "Netflix-ey." To do that, I looked up the default font it uses, which happens to cost $50. Nope.

I'll leave you to figure out how I integrated that font into my image. But that's it, in a nutshell. Ugh.