photoshop before and afters
I have a girl-crush. This is the first time I think I've ever admitted, or even felt, that I have a full-on girl-crush. Who is it, you ask? Ree Drummond, Pioneer Woman, of course!
I know, a lot of you have probably heard of her and already fallen in love with her, especially if you love photography. And while I do love photography, I haven't had the fortune to be able to afford a fancy-dancy camera yet, so I kind of just stalk photo blogs, dreaming that I will one day take photos like that :)
Well, thanks to PW and her super-cool way of explaining photoshop editing that doesn't make you want to curl up in a ball somewhere, I have ventured out into the post-processing world, full-on!
Now, just a reminder, I use photoshop all day, every day - so I should be pretty good at this stuff, right? Wrong. I use photoshop to layout websites and cut out products, blah, blah, blah. But I rarely use photoshop for, well, photos. Now that I have been forced to choose photos for my wedding album that will please all sides of the family, I have been working more and more on choosing the photos I want to include in my and K's own album. The "family-pleasing" album will be edited and laid out by my professional photographer, but my personal album will be edited and assembled by yours truly ;) Not to mention the 2,473 photos I brought back from our Beijing honeymoon (that's not an exaggeration, that's exactly how many photos I took)!!! So, after that long explanation, that's why I've been trying to learn more and more about photo editing for my own personal use.
So, below are two before-and-afters, done by following this PW tutorial.
My sis on my wedding day (yes, she only has on one set of fake eyelashes in this pic, lol):
I wanted to smooth her skin, sharpen her eyes, bring out her highlights, and blur the background a bit to give the illusion of a "depth of field". Oh, and a boost of color doesn't hurt ;)
And me in Hooter's in Beijing (yes they have a Hooter's, no the girls don't have hooters):
This one's a little more subtle - with the background blurred just a bit, my skin smoothed, and eyes sharpened a touch.
before
after
As I mentioned, both used the same "techniques"/"process", but the second one is just a little more subtle. I still wanted it to look like a snapshot, just not with my shiny face distracting the poor viewer, lol. The first, of my sis, I wanted to "stylize" a bit more because, after all, she is a drama queen (if you couldn't tell by the photo).
So, not too shabby, huh? I'm so excited to try more and more editing to take my "eh." photos to "oh!" photos! Yay!
nicky
10 comments:
i think you did a great job playing with actions. :)
That's awesome! I wish I had the patience/time/willpower to do anything with our photos... I may have to talk Matt into getting me Photoshop!
Photoshop scares me! haha I like what you did with your photos!
Nice work! Mike's job is working with photoshop but I want to learn how to use it too. I guess we would need to buy it for our at home computer but it is so darn expensive!
lauren - you should definitely get it for your home! it makes things so much easier - even that baby shower invite you are working on :) since a lot of girls are interested in photography lately, and even just creating invites, etc., i thought it might be fun to have a little photoshop workshop with stlwed girls - what do you think? instead of taking classes for it, we could just specifically talk about things we want to do with it and run down the basics. i'd love to share a little and learn from others as well...
That sounds awesome! Like at someone's house? And everyone brings their laptop/camera? And bottle of wine ;)
exactly!!! maybe i can host a gno and that will be my theme? oh the possibilities...
It's so much fun to play around with the actions, isn't it! :-)
i am so intimidated by the PW's website, there is so much busy-ness all over the page! but those tutorials are clearly kickass so i need to just get over my fear of the clutter and try to dive in, no?
i like your photo re-dos though. and i use www.picnik.com to do fun things to my photos, that site is free and ADDICTING. :)
I wish I could make my eyebrow go up like that.
Post a Comment