Butterfly Pictures

In my email inbox the other day I received a newsletter about photographing butterflies. You need to shoot them in jpeg format (not RAW) and use a fast shutter speed. On Saturday Meghan saw this beautiful butterfly while sitting on the deck and told me to get my camera. I was very fortunate that the butterfly hung around and let me take his photo. It gave me an opportunity to put the tips from that email newsletter into practice. Sure hope you enjoy these pics.

"Just when the caterpillar thought the world was over, it became a butterfly."

More digital scrapping

Hi All,

Tonight in my digital class I learned how to apply a hand tint feature to a photo. The photo below is of Noah at Line Creek playing with a rock. He loves rocks and that day he had a pine cone as well. I just loved the softness of the hand tint look.

Since I was on a roll with editing photos I decided to do a search on word art. I found this beautiful beach quote and thought it would look really nice with an ocean photo background. I've also added a digital frame and will print this out and frame it for my photo wall or to put in the guest bedroom. Hope you enjoy my latest creations.

Here it is!

The other night during my digital brushes class, I was perusing the class gallery. I came across this awesome quote by Dr. Suess that someone had done a digital layout to frame and put up in their classroom. Since Nichole will be teaching first grade this year I thought it would be perfect for her to use in her room as well. While I was able to duplicate much of it, I did a different collage of brushes than what the original artist had done. I can't take credit for much of the design, but it sure was fun to do. Can't wait to see it printed and framed.

Digital Elements

Okay, I think I'm officially hooked on digital scrapbooking and PSE. Because I had so much fun with the free Photoshop Elements class I took last week, I decided to sign up for another class. This one was not free, but I figured for $25 it was worth a try. Boy am I obsessed. Every night I rush home from work, get whatever for dinner and then plop myself down in front of my computer for some PSE fun.

This new class is concentrating solely on using the brush tool. This is my favorite Elements tool and I've loved using it. But I was only scratching the surface by "stamping" an image onto my photograph and adjusting the opacity or only applying part of the brush to the image.

What I learned in tonight's class is that you can load a brush into your eraser tool. We used this to create a grunge or sanding effect on our digital element. It is such an awesome technique. Below is the project that I made using the eraser tool after building the element from scratch. It is saved as a png file so that you can put it on a digital scrapbook page or print it out and cut it from paper also. Very versitile and fun. Don't be surprised if you see this again in the next few weeks on one of my family photos.

Ready For More Textures?

As I mentioned a few posts back, one of the best digital scrapbookers, Jessica Sprague recently offered a free digital photo editing class. Lesson 5 was applying textures to photos. In the lesson there were links to several different sites offering many free textures. Some of the textures on the free sites are so awesome. It opens a whole new world in photo editing when you use textures. While I've tried my hand at using one texture on a photo, I've never tried 3 at one time. Shown below is the before and after of a unique tree that was in the water at Lake LBJ when we were there in July. I applied 3 textures and used the blending mode of soft light on each layer. After adding all the layers, I applied a free frame from Jessica Sprague for the finishing touch. Hope you like it.

Textures

Today I decided to try my hand at usung textures in Photoshop Elements 7. Nichole's mother-in-law is an awesome photographer. Recently, Connie took some beautiful photos of sunflowers. She was not happy with the color of the sky since it was an overcast day. Since I had read about textures in the PSE User magazine I decided her photo was the perfect chance to practice some texture techniques. Below is the result.

I've also attached a family photo from the reunion in Austin. This is my entire side of the family minus my brother and nephew, Joe. How about those shirts?

Family Reunion and PSE7

Today's post is about using Photoshop Elements 7 and a picture from the recent Puzio family reunion.

Last week the majority of the Puzio family descended upon Lake LBJ just outside of Austin, Texas. My sister, Shelley owns a lovely lake home right on the lake and we rented a home about 4 doors down for the week. There were 22 of us split between two homes. We had a great time. Fortunately we had the opportunity to take some family photos. As some of you know I worked incredibly hard to tie dye 24 t-shirts just for the photo shoot. The shirts all turned out great and everyone really enjoyed wearing them. The photo attached is of me and my 4 children at the lake wearing our shirts.

The reason the title of this post includes PSE7 is because the frame and word art was added using PSE7. I'm taking a free photo editing class from JessicaSprague.com. She has lots of great video tutorials on using this wonderful photo editing tool. Feel free to check it out. You'll also be seeing more of my family reunion photos enhanced with PSE7 as I learn more skills.

Thanks for visiting.