Brenden wore BIG BOY underwear at school ALL day yesterday and didn't have any accidents. His teachers were SO proud of him as were we. He does much better with underwear than pull ups. I wasn't sure what they daycare stance was on 'accidents' but they said to just bring in underwear and extra pants and they would make sure he used the potty all day. Its a huge milestone for us! He wears underwear at home a lot but never at school until now. I hope he keeps up the good work.
Logan is doing great. His teachers told me the other day that he was SO good at talking, and he really is. He easily has twice the vocabulary Brenden did at that age. I guess having an older brother has its benefits. He goes to the eye dr. on the 12th to see about his blocked tear duct and then to a urologist on the 17th to look at his hydrocele. So lets hope neither visit is too rough on the little guy. He's been sleeping great lately!
I've been playing around with some photoshop techniques I'm learning online and in books and then applying my own artistic eye and have a fun series of before/after pictures to share (click on any image to view a larger photo)
This is a picture I took in the hospital of Logan. He is just laying on my bed with the white sheets and the harsh flourescent lighting. I will tell you with all of these pictures that I can't remember my exact workflow but will give you a general idea of what I did! I did my best to adjust the lighting, brightening, increasing contrast, adjusting the levels. I used the 'remove color cast' option in the Enhance menu. This feature has you click on an area that should be a pure white/grey/black and it determines what the color cast on that particular 'drop' of photo you picked up and then removes that hue from the entire picture. I had to click around a few times to get the best drop of pure white to really remove that blue tint. I added a vignette to darken the edges of the photo. And I used a free action available at The CoffeeShop Blog called Baby PowderRoom. An action is just a set of pre-set layers that you can adjust and manipulate to use on top of your photo. This action allows you to soften skin, lighten it, even out the color, give it a soft glow, etc. It really is like patting your little baby with baby powder :)
I really like this picture (both the before and after). I tried to do any lighting/color correcting - which was actually pretty minimal in this example. I boosted up the contrast to really get some of the cool colors of the leaves, while trying to avoid making his face too bright and his red shirt too red. I added some 'grit' to the leaves to really give it some texture and a slight vignette to 'burn' the edges of the photo.
This image I was trying to be a little more 'trendy'.. I'm not sure if I succeeded or not :) I played around with the contrast and colors to make things a little more exaggerated and the colors of the background leaves a little more rich. I also added 'grit' to the background of this picture to really pull the texture of the wood and leaves.
This was just a fun little project in trying to add a texture to a picture. I think it turned out really cool. I just put a texture (found free at shadowhouse creations ) layer on top of the original photo. I adjusted the opacity to make it a bit transparent. I masked out any of the texture on top of Brenden that I could. Then I used the eliptical select tool and selected a 'spotlight' area around Brenden and used a transparent brush to paint the selected are black on the mask to essentially erase some of the texture around Brenden. This helped prevent seeing a very 'fake' harsh edge around Brenden where tiny bits of the original white backdrop were visible around the edge of his body where I couldn't precisely cut the texture off of Brenden -- if that makes sense. The final result was quite striking though - in my humble opinion.
In this photo - I give a lot of credit to my camera and lens. All of the depth and blur are straight out of the camera. I just added some color contrast, warmed it up a little, added a vignette, and sharpened the eye area a bit to really make his eyelashes stand out.
This one was just a pretty simple crop and color correct. I also used some of Photoshops special brushes to brush on high contrast on the pillows and also to sharpen the pillows a little to give their fur more texture.
I guess the big point in all of this is that when you see beautifully tranformed images - don't think the photographer did a simple one-click voila! instant beautiful photo! effect. Most photo editing softwares require a lot of human intervention to do a great job. And a lot of it is also your own eye and taste. I think I was looking for that magic photo art maker out there and realized that it didn't exist. So I can easily understand why good pro photography is more expensive, simply because after the photo shoot, expect your photographer to spend an hour or two more fine-tuning the images. I am in my discovery phase right now so I'm not ashamed to admit that I throw an effect or layer on my photo just to delete it because it didn't look that great. But I'm finding with practice that its becoming easier to look at a photo and go "ah, I need to adjust the levels, the contrast, sharpen a little.." etc. Its all fun tho :)
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