Fun with pictures

Lately Lillian has been doing a lot of sleeping and nursing…she is almost always doing one or the other right now. I think she needs extra of both because she is still under the weather, poor baby. But anyway, that leaves me a lot of free time at the computer while she’s nursing or sleeping on me. So I’ve been having a lot of fun playing around with pictures of her!

For this picture Lillian was laying on her back on a black blanket. In Photoshop CS2 I opened this photo and one of my 12×12 digital scrapbooking papers I created (same one that I used as a background image on my blog). I added the paper as a new layer on top of Lillian’s photo. I then duplicated it (in case I messed up) and made that duplicate invisible. On the top layer I lowered the opacity until I could see Lillian through the “paper” and then I used the eraser tool to get rid of the “paper” that was covering her. As you can see I didn’t do too well around her edges,  but that’s not that important. (You can always do an outer glow on the ‘paper’ layer to further mask any edge imperfections.)

Then, because the pattern on the ‘paper’ started out a peach color and I wanted blue, I opened it up in Paint Shop Pro X2. There is a feature there where you can make anything grayscale and then manually select a color you want to change it to. Very cool! I LOVE that tool. So I extracted a blue from Lillian’s headband and tinted the grayscale that color. Saved it as a .png, opened it back up in Photoshop, pasted it on top, and voila! The above image!

Then…thanks to a very fun site called Picnik, I went crazy adding lovely text to her image, and a couple of stars. They have all sorts of fonts and stickers and tons of cool things you can do enhance your pictures!! (See image below.) I started out with a free account there, but all the Premium features kept taunting me so I finally caved in and bought a yearly membership for $24.95. The way I see it, Josh and I don’t go out and spend too much money on “fun” things (The last movie we went to see in the theater was back in January to see Harry Potter Part 1!) so this is really nothing when you think of it as having fun for 2 bucks a month!

Then I added this cool sticker and some text over it:

And here it looks like she’s sitting with a pumpkin! 😉

So, all sorts of cool things you can do with your pictures! In a later post I might do a step-by-step tutorial post with pictures on how to add a fun background to your pictures, like the one above. I don’t think my ‘instructional’ advice on how to do it up there would be enough explanation on how to do it. But it’s a start for now, anyway, to show what I’ve been up to.