Cutting the cake

This one was pretty tricky. When I looked through all the pictures of the cake cutting event I noticed that this one, the best one I have of them actually "cutting" the cake was really overexposed. At the time I was a little flustered because Matt was standing right in front of Shannon and I didn't know if I should stop them and rearrange them or just do my best. (Too bad I wasn't on the other side of that window.) I was leaning over to the left as far as I possibly could, but alas, this is the best view I could get and the farther Matt bent over, the more he hid Shannon. Anyway, so I didn't notice that the pictures were pretty overexposed until it was too late. Thanks to photoshop I think I did a decent job of cleaning it up. I used a trick I learned from this great web site, and a little clone stamping to remake the cake knife, napkin, and edges on the cake in some small places.

Again, I'm still not sure about black and white or color, maybe I should ask the bride and let her pick which one she likes best. :)

"Before" original overexposed photo

Fresco Fliter

I wanted to try out some new filters in Photoshop. I really like this picture of Jason and Peter playing Chess while we were camping in the Black Hills. There weren't many chess boards around, so they made one and found stones to play with. It was great. The filter that I ended up choosing is the Fresco one.

merging photographs

This is a fun one; I might not have caught it if Scott hadn't of called to me "Becca! Get your camera, your baby's playing with flowers!" ha ha, thanks Scott! I shot a few and one of my favorites had a truck towing a boat taking up the entire upper back of the picture so I copied the background from one photo and layered it on top of my favorite. There is a new magic wand tool in CS4 that is great for this called "Quick Selection Wand" it smartly grabs parts of the photo and then using alt and shift you can add or take away what you want, then use the eraser tool to smooth out the edges from one photo to the other between layers. Yeah! Always great when I learn something new and very useful!

Vignette

Okay, first of all, I litterally was crying when I looked through my old pictures of Isaac trying to find the perfect one to try a new effect on. I've seen a lot of portrait shots with the cool vignette effect. I tried it on the bridge picture from Shannon's wedding but the way I tried it was a PAIN and it didn't look exactly like the ones I had seen on the internet. So I did a google search (a novel idea) and found a tutorial for darkening the edges, and... voilá!

Team work

Jason actually shot this picture, it is probably my favorite... or at least on the top 10 favorites from Shannon's wedding. We tag teamed the picture taking and I sure love this one, such a great moment. The little girl is Shannon's niece and her mom, Shannon's sister. I enhanced some of the colors, the primary colors to be exact, red to bring out the orange flowers in her bouquet, yellow (for the hair ties and bouquet), and blue obviously for all the blues in the photo. I also turned down the saturation on the florescent light above Shannon's head coming in from behind her because, well, it bugged me! :)

Before

After

Fixing shadows and reflections

I was looking through Shannon's wedding pictures getting the final DVD ready to burn for her and Matt to keep and I found this great shot of her dad with her brother-in-law Tom. I love the actual picture, the moment and everything, but the shadows behind them and reflection on her dad's face was really bothering me, so I fixed it! How fun is that!? I absolutely love how it turned out, you can barely tell. Because the background was so easy to work with I just used a clone stamp to fix it. Easy as pie really.

Before

After

More Color Silhouette

Color Silhouette

I took some pictures of my mom's hostas plants because they bloom these pretty purple bell flowers this time of year. I've been thinking about doing these pictures for our bathroom to decorate. Our color scheme is purple and black so I thought it would be cool to have silver picture frames with black and white pictures of purple flowers but leave the flower color exposed. Anyway, so I tried it today and this is what I ended up with. It's a little late for me to worry about a few spots I missed, I'll get them before I print them for our bathroom if I do go ahead with the idea.