I know - I'm sure you're agreeing with my husband on the crazy thing now. But for a self-taught Photoshop user, anything that's awesome and saves me time makes me SO happy. So I'm going to share with you the link to the website that brought me to tears with their great tutorials - jessicasprague.com. Go to free stuff/tutorials.
So I thought I'd share with you a few before/after photos to share the reasons why I love, and use, Photoshop Elements. Click on any of the photos to enlarge them.
Reason 1: Color correction. Last July I went with my parents and my olders sister on a trip to Idaho, Spokane Washington, and Montana. I hope to blog about it sometime because I have some amazing photos, but I have lots of catching up to do. On our trip we went to Glacier National Park. BEAUTIFUL! I loved it so much and saw some amazing scenery, but most of my distant shots had sort of a haze about them. The following photo is one of my first after entering the park and is of Lake McDonald. I did a soft focus and saturation and contrast adjustments to bring out the colors that were lost in the haze.
Reason 2: Contrast adjustments. While in Glacier NP I was amazed by these flowers we saw all over. The plant is called Bear Grass and I had never seen it before. The close-up shot I took of it turned out good, but a soft light filter and contrast adjustment really made it pop.
Reason 3: Photo effects. A while back I started making WANTED posters of Noah and Evan for their bedroom. I found some cute barnwood frames at D.I. for $1.00 each! Anyway, their not done because I can't think of what they are wanted for yet, but here's the photo of Noah for his poster. I did an old photo effect on it. When I put it on the poster I will also make the edges rough and torn looking. It's fun to take photos like this because they can wear any colors in the photo and it doesn't matter in the final print.
Reason 4: Digital Scrapbooking. This was the whole reason I bought Photoshop Elements in the first place, and yet it's what I use it for least now. I have good intentions though! I really am going to continue to scrapbook our family photos digitally, I just haven't been doing it much lately. But it is SO fun. I love the look I get, and there are tons and tons of free digital scrapbook supplies available on the internet. You really shouldn't need to buy any supplies after a while of collecting. I have made a purchase only once for specific supplies I wanted. I get freebies everyday from www.scrapgirls.com in their daily newsletter, so I love them and will mention them specifically, but you can do searches, or visit my links in the sidebar for others.
Keeping digital scrapbooking in mind, I also take lots of photos of things now to use as backgrounds on my pages. Things like water, rocks, grasses, sky, and all sorts of textures make great backgrounds and go so well with your photos because they are from the same locations. On the following scrapbook page I used a photo of some scrub oak at the dinousaur park for my background and parts of other photos I took as embellishments. This is the title page of our trip to the dino park.
Reason 5: Cloning and swapping heads. Sounds kind of like something that would happen in a science fiction movie, but when you want to get a perfect group photo these techniques are priceless. People pay big money for this, so it's a great thing to learn to do on your own.
In November of last year my in-laws had their 50th anniversary party. With all of their kids and their spouses there it was a great opportunity to get a group photo. It happened to snow while we were in the restauraunt celebrating, creating this beautiful backdrop for our photo. One of my neices took the photos with my sister-in-law's camera and afterward I had her e-mail them to me to edit.
The photos turned out really good, but you know how it is, there's always a few things you want to change to make it perfect. Everyone got to pick which one was their favorite and then I swapped a few heads or faces using the selection tools to make everyone look their best. The biggest change was moving a brother-in-law out from behind his wife a little so he showed up better. I swapped three heads total. Click on the photo for a larger view so you can see the changes - maybe.
Reason 6: For fun. While we were hiking through the rainforest in Hawaii we kept commenting on how Jurassic Park was filmed there and how we really wouldn't be surprised to see dinosaurs walking around in that environment. After our trip to Hawaii I put together a slideshow to show the whole Moon Family to watch and I couldn't help throwing in a few dino's for fun. In this photo my Mom was admiring the flowers hanging from the tree, but I had another photo of the same dino in the scrapbook page above that went with the lighting in this photo perfectly. I used other dinosaur photos and even the "Warning: Live Raptor Area" photo to throw a bit of humor into our slideshow.
Reason 7: Blogging! This is what I used to make these photo collages and to make sure that every photo I blog looks it's best before I post it. It may seem silly to even blog about Photoshop, but if it makes me that emotional, it deserves to be here. Try it! It may bring you to tears also (maybe bad ones at first, but hopefully good ones with the help of great tutorials).
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