New series: Photoshop Love!

I came up with the idea of starting a new series of posts by me called "Photoshop Love". (Other rejected titles were "How Photoshop Saves My Bacon" , "Proud of My Photoshop Crutch", and "Photoshop: Changing The World One Clone Stamp At a Time!") Here's what I'll do: I'll post a SOOC photo (that's straight-out-of-camera), and you can see just how bad a photographer I can be. LOL! Then, I'll show you that by the awesome power of Photoshop/Photoshop Elements, I'm able to get a salvageable photo out of these...let's call 'em "missteps". :) So, look for the label "PS Love" on this blog for these if you ever need a good laugh or want to feel better about your photography. Just sayin'! :D

Please keep in mind that I'm not trying to say that the "after" pictures represent the most stunning photography in the world. Mostly this is just to show how much fun it can be to play in Photoshop.

So, to start this, here's one of my most dramatic rescues. I have this picture of my daugther back when she was crawling, and we'd just bought this tutu/tulle skirt from Gymbo. I liked the little bare feet with the skirt, but there were soooooo many distractions. (That's a nice euphamism for toy junk, btw.) Here's the SOOC .jpg, although it was resized for the web post here.

So, we've got junk, we've got flash shadow, we've got bleckh. I ended up doing something I now call "digital housecleaning". Let me tell you, real housecleaning is much easier! Your digi tools of choice for digital housecleaning are the clone tool and healing brush. This was all done back in PSE4, btw. It involved some cutting and pasting of clean areas of the wall, too. Some blur was added, too, to help mask the clone job. And, the first step was, of course, to crop it.

Anyways, here's the after:

(Now why can't my house always look this neat? Oh, right...kids!) Hope that was interesting. Thanks for looking!