capturing a moment...

Finding a great shot within a not-so-great shot is simpler than you think.
Just keep your eye on the subject or the moment. Whatever happens to be getting in the way of the shot can easily be remedied.

Take this shot for example.

First of all, we have to crop out the half of a half-naked mommy on the right side of the photo. The daddy apparently thought it would be funny to capture mommy in this vulnerable state while pretending to just take a picture of the babies.
we also have all the crap in the background that is quite frankly not ascetically pleasing.

so let's start by cropping the photo.

But due to the angle of the shot, we have to crop it at an angle.

Now, the colors here are neutral and looking a bit blah.

So let's convert it to black and white.

At this point, I put a Sepia photo filter on it. Some shots just look better with a warmer filter.

then I adjusted the exposure a bit, just to give it some final tweaks.

Now, as great as this shot looks, I wanted to frame it in black so it needed a bit of shading around the edges just to add a little depth.
For this, I used the Marque tool to draw just inside the outer edges of the photo.

Now refine your edges. I went with very low contrast to avoid harsh lines and Expanded 35+.
I also turned the featheredness and smoothness up high for a soft-focus look.

You then, Select-Inverse and Edit-Fill with black.

Finally, deselect.

Now for the poster frame.


I created a narrow white canvas first. (20 pixels)

Then I created a larger black canvas. (200 pixels)

I thought this shot would be great with some text so I selected the text tool, chose white and centered it in the black field.

Comparing the two shots, you can see that this whole process is totally worth it in the end.
What looked to be a wasted shot, turned out to be a golden opportunity to capture the sweet moment of my babies sleeping.

A big "thank you" to my hubbie for taking the original picture!

basic border tutorial...

I've been asked more than once "how do you put the border around your photos?" So I thought I would post a quick tutorial. I use Photoshop CS3, so I don't know how well this translates to earlier versions. nonetheless, here we go.

first, open any photo you want a frame around (this works best on flattened images but if you need several layers just be sure the background layer is active when you apply the script), and make sure your action pallet is showing (shift-f9 if it isn't) ...

then, click on the "create new action" button...

in the dialog box that pops up give your action a name...

choose the set you want it in and if you want to give it a shortcut, now is the time to choose that...

now Photoshop is "recording" every click you make (every breath you take, it'll be watching you.)
oh. sorry! that was the geek husband influence kicking in.)
click on (the menu bar) image, then canvas size (or alt+ctrl C) and in the dialog box set the size of the border, I use 50 pixels that way I can run the script more than once if I want a wider border...

most importantly make sure the "Relative" box is checked and the anchor is in the middle...

and the last option, "canvas extension color" will determine the color of your border. I use black most of the time. this gives you a basic border...

click OK.

then go back to the actions pallet and click on stop...

now that you have your action recorded, you can replay it on just about any image you like by either using the shortcut key you assigned it or by clicking on it, then clicking "play".

you can also mix this up a bit if you like. while recording you can increase canvas size more than once using different colors and/or sizes.
I must give the credit for this tutorial to my geek of a husband, Jason.
(he told me to type that, I swear!)