I love photoshop actions!

Ever since I coerced my poor hubby into buying photoshop for me last year, I have been in photo bliss. I had previously dabbled in it eons ago at my old job, but never fully understood it.

shoot, you could play with it for years and still never understand everything. It's that type of program.

But when I stumbled upon The Pioneer Woman's free action sets, I was hooked! These little beauties let even a total photoshop doofus (like myself) make the worst photo look awesome. 

case in point:

 this is a pic of my little man sooc (straight out of camera - I just learned that photo jargon not too long ago myself). And no, he's not hitting puberty 10 years too soon. The 'stache' is the leftover remnants of his wacky attire for Wacky Wednesday at our church :) I'll have to post more pics soon. It was pretty hysterical. I sported a 'stache too, but don't get your hopes up. I won't be posting pics of my own pubescent self anytime soon!

I digress...

 So here is the photo after I tweaked it in photoshop. I used PW's sharpening actions and mcp actions touch of light to lighten up the dark shadows. Then I followed it up with The Coffee Shop Blog's rounded corner action (which also defines & sharpens and resizes for the web!)

So if you have photoshop (or the cheaper version PS Elements), definitely check out these ladies' sites! They are so talented and generous enough to give away these awesome actions for free!

Happy photoshopping! 

edited to add: well shoot - looks like the rounded corner one didn't take for some reason and I'm too tired to try it again. So looks like I need to keep playing with it. I told you, you can never know all there is to know about photoshop! 

photshop fun

I've spent the past few days trying to figure out this blog stuff. I'm still not happy with the look, but while I'm messing around with everything and trying to educate myself in the fine tunings of blog design - I thought I'd share what I'm learning. 

The good news for us newbies is there are TONS of great sites and free downloads out there. Which, because of my darn indecisiveness, is probably part bad news as well. There's so much to choose from, my brain is spinning. backgrounds, headers, widgets, brushes, bling, patterns, papers, etc... now I know why people pay other people to do this for them! But I actually think learning this stuff is kinda fun, and I've always been a glutton for punishment. So please bear (bare?) with me. 

One of the great sites I found is digital-retouching.net And I followed one of her photoshop tutorials and was actually able to make this cutie:

which I placed on this cutie:

who is now this 7 year old cutie:

how is it possible that i have a 7 year old when I'm only 21? just kidding. but gosh, she is getting too big too fast...

so hopefully this link will work and you can try out this fun photoshop tut. you can make awesome labels that say whatever you want. like for instance, bestest, skinniest, non-frumpiest mom in the world...er or something like that :)

how to make embossed labels in photoshop