Photoshop Fun

If you ever wonder what I spend my time doing (besides laundry, dishes, cooking, cleaning, shopping and other minute details of a stay-at-home mom), it's Photoshop. I guess you could say it's my other little addiction, besides the actual photos themselves. Because without Photoshop, most pictures are a little on the dull side. There's always a little fixing up to be done. I posted this cute picture of Tyler at the beach yesterday, but it's a lot different from the original.

This picture had a lot of potential because of Tyler's adorable smile and overall good lighting. But I didn't like the busy background (i.e. Megan and Peter - as much as I love them, I just wanted to have Tyler in this picture).

So first I cropped it just enough to exclude Megan. Peter was a little trickier because he was right behind Tyler. So I used the clone stamp tool and spot healing brush tool (the one that looks like a bandaid) to cover him up with the ocean and sand.

One important thing to remember is to always do your corrections on layers so you can easily undo them, compare back and forth, or reduce the %. For example, when I fix the coloring (my favorite is skin tone, which I used above - you click on someone's skin and it adjusts the color beautifully), I often reduce the % ever so slightly until it's just right. Otherwise it can be too yellow.

Then I tweak the lighting just a tad - usually increasing the brightness and bumping up the contrast.

Finally, I love to increase the saturation of individual colors. I don't typically do them all, because it ends up looking fake. My favorites are cyan (which makes the sky pop), yellow (which helps grass look more vibrant - sometimes even more than the green), and either blue or red, depending on what people are wearing in the picture. If someone's face is too bright red, I might reduce the red saturation. So those are my favorite Photoshop features. The more I do it, the quicker I get. I just kinda go throught those steps in order. In fact I didn't save each step when I did this picture for my blog yesterday, so I just redid them real quick just now. So if you thought there was a slight difference between the top picture (the one I did yesterday) and the bottom one (which I did just now), you're right. But they are really close, proving how reproducible and easy it is. Now I really need to go do something productive, like start getting ready for our big trip to Utah. Or maybe I'll go make banana bread out of all our rotting bananas.