The project involving Finale was interesting at first but proved to be somewhat frustrating. It wasn't hard to find Bach Chorales on the internet, but they were all music and mp3 files. I eventually found piano PDF versions. This was my first time using Finale, and I actually found it pretty intuitive. My composer friends have told me that Sibelius is vastly superior but, I don't believe you can download a version of Sibelius for free.

I found that inputting the notes in Finale was fairly easy, but when I tried to take screen shots and move into Photoshop, I began to have problems. Everytime I took a screen shot, an opened it in photo shop, the notes, and or lines would be misaligned. Eventually I discovered that I was simply viewing the file in photoshop at an incorrect percentage. The next part of trying to adjust, and convert to black and white was somewhat tricky. The version of PS that was demonstrated in class was not the same one I had, so it took some trial and error to get the final product right. I was able to make it work by converting it to a newspaper setting, turning the contrast all the way up, and dropping the lightness to almost nothing.

While this was a fairly simple project, I encountered, with many of the projects as well, a decent amount of hiccups along the way. There is often a small error I might make, or perhaps some simple step I leave out, but I feel that the amount of time I end up spending on these projects is always more than it should normally take. Continually saving and uploading also adds time to the process. But I am glad I have had the opportunity to work with these programs, and I can definitely see myself using Finale more often in the future.