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Wednesday, March 4, 2009

Playing around

Pin It Okay, so I'm still learning how to use my camera. I suspect this is going to be a life long project! Well, to add to that, I was forced against my will to switch from Digital Image Pro to Photoshop Elements for my photo editing. I've used DIP enough to be good at it and even though it's not made any longer, I didn't want to let it go. Then I got a new computer and can't find the CD to put DIP on it. So ... PSE it is. I assumed they would be similar and it would be an easy adjustment. Um, no. Not so much. I'll end up glad I made the switch, because digiscrappers aren't doing a whole lot for DIP any longer, but everyone is designing things that work in PSE. It the meantime though, I have a few bald spots where I've pulled out my hair in the past few days.

So ... here's what I've been playing with today. Lightening eyes. Let me tell ya - blue eyes are easy, green eyes are easy. Dark brown eyes are not. It's almost like perms - almost right ... not quite right ... WRONG~!! I think I have the technique down though, so that's worth something. :)

Pics --
before:


after:


Cool eye shining, huh? Yeah yeah, I probably still overdid it ... but it's way better than my FIRST attempt, which isn't even shareworthy unless you've seen bigger messes I've made than that. :-P (btw ... somehow the edit is lighter on here than it really is. Not sure why that is!)

More playing around, this time with the camera. I've been playing with the manual controls some and wanted this picture. Woot for finally get it just like I wanted it.

Of course I tried the "other half" of this - focusing on her and leaving the flowers out of focus and I couldn't make it work. I think maybe if she just had one or two flowers, but my focus kept going to the flowers rather than the child.

(As an aside ... see blogger? This is why I'm cheating on you with facebook! It took about five minutes to upload those pictures and you did NOT upload them in the same order I chose!)

I was playing with color on the picture of Madelyn and gave up after realizing that I was going to have to color every stem individually, and some of the flowers too to make just the flowers have color. Maybe if I get an extra hour or seven sometime.

Anyway ... nothing earth shattering in this post, just wanted to share the results of an afternoon of playing with my camera and photoshop.

9 comments:

Micah said...

I shall not have camera envy
I shall not have camera envy
I shall not have camera envy

Micah said...

nor laptop envy
nor laptop envy
nor laptop envy

Micah said...

nor PSE envy
nor PSE envy
nor PSE envy

LOL

April said...

Mel, for the pic with Madelyn and the flowers....can you use your lasso tool to get her, then convert to black and white? I would zoom waaaaaay in to get in between the flowers. You will obviously have to do it several times.

Is that even what you are going for?

And JEALOUS you have FLOWERS! Tomorrow is our first day in a long time it is going to stay above freezing. Woo hoo!

April said...

p.s. there is a wedding pic of mine on my blog, where everything is B&W except the stained glass window...that is how I did that...

melanie said...

LOL Micah!!

Yeah, that's what I was going for but didn't want to invest the time it would take to go through all of the flowers. I did a pic of Brendan pretty easily ... well, he doesn't have stems or petals. :-P

April said...

I am totally bored. Hope you don't mind :)

http://i16.photobucket.com/albums/b37/daisyprincess98/mad2.jpg

melanie said...

Oh cool~!!! I started doing that yesterday afternoon and was all "this is going to take too long ... whine whine whine ..." and gave up. LOL

Unknown said...

How can Bren possibly be that big? I love the pictures...love the flower pic especially!