Why I love Photoshop

Last Tuesday, I took some photos of Kylie fingerpainting. I had the camera set on Auto and was sloppily snapping away while trying to keep the paint on the table and not in Kylie's mouth, or hair or on my camera or clothes. At the end of day, I loaded the pictures on my computer and was not surprised when I saw that they were complete crap.

Out of all the crappy pictures, I thought this one was the most interesting and worth spending some time on.


So while Kylie was napping today, I decided to play with it. I open it in Adobe Camera Raw and do some tweaking.

Already it is looking better. But if you look, you can see where the flash bounced off the chair on both the left and right of Kylie's head. Plus, we have the ugly orange booster seat that's clashing with everything. What was I thinking when I bought this? It's a scrapbooking nightmare to have that bright orange seat to contend with.

So, I click on my clone brush and paint the flash and some of the booster seat away. Give your mouse finger a workout. Scroll up and down and check out the differences!


The angles of the chair, window sill and the table are bugging me. So I come in and do a tight, angled crop of the picture.


So much better!

And finally, just for the heck of it, I convert it black and white.

(I used a new tip I learned at the seminar. I used to slide the saturation slider all the way to the left to convert a photo. But on this one, I hit "gradient map" instead. Just as simple but looks much better. If you try it, just be sure that your foreground and background colors are set to black and white first).

All of these steps took me 20 minutes. You might think that it's a long time to spend on a single photo. But it's fun! It's like a game.

Of course, there are dishes piled in the sink and dust bunnies floating around my wood floors. But hey, a girl's gotta have fun somehow!