Taking the Red Out

I've torn myself away from playing with layers, and I've started trying to recover some of the old photos. The top photo is one taken of Right Back many many years ago. His grandmother had this photo in an album that wasn't photo safe. There may have been other factors as well that caused the picture to take on a reddish cast. I will admit that the house was a pale pink, but not that pink.



I'd scanned this top photo some time ago with my HP all-in-one. I think it did a pretty good job of scanning, but there wasn't any way for me to really fix the color problem.


I retrieved the original photo from its resting place and scanned it again with the Epson photo scanner.

I clicked on customize when the window popped up, and I clicked for it to adjust color.

I then opened it in Photo Shop Elements and did another automatic color adjustment.

I'm thinking that the second photo would be far nicer in an album, and I feel I have that precious moment back again.

I'm seeing all kinds of possibilities here!

Playing With Photo Shop Elements

I've certainly strayed from card making lately, but I just may have found what I want to do when I grow up. I want to play with graphics!!! Oh, wait! I am grown up, and I am playing with this new toy. I just LOVE learning new things.

Last night I decided that I'd best get into the tutorials that come in Adobe Photo Shop Elements. It certainly beats trying to figure everything out by myself.

I've always wondered how people took photographs and changed their content moving things from one picture to another. After the tutorial.... I knew! It is about making layers.

This photograph was taken in I-Needa's yard close to her front door. I opened that in Photo Shop Elements and used it as a background layer. Not long ago, I-Needa decided to take up painting. Her first project was a mushroom. Her second was this frog. She had sent me photos of each of these items separately.

I opened the mushroom (brought it into Elements) and pulled it on top of the yard photo. Then I erased the background from the mushroom picture with a background eraser. I then had the mushroom showing in her yard. I used a move tool to position the mushroom, and a sizing tool to get it the size I wanted.

I then opened the frog picture into Elements and pulled it on top of the yard photo. Then I erased the background with a little background eraser. Again, using the move and sizing tools, I worked until I was satisfied with the look. Then I used a flatten image command followed by saving the photo.

No! I am not ready yet to take pictures and try to teach Photo Shop Elements. I'm a very very beginner. I have to tell you.... this is fun... way fun... totally cool... I see new things on the horizon.

Working With Photos

Today I purchased and set up this new photo scanner which I purchased from Staples. It is an Epson Perfection V500 Photo scanner. It came with scanner software bundled with Adobe Photo Shop Elements.

Why, oh why, am I getting involved with this? It is something that seems to be growing bigger by the day. It started as a simple desire to copy and repair some of the old family photos so that they could be preserved in either a book or scrapbook form.

I quickly found out that my regular all-in-one HP printer/scanner/copier just wasn't up to the task. Don't get me wrong... I use the dickens out of that piece of equipment. I just found that a dedicated photo scanner would produce a higher quality and do more for the photos.

I'm now at square one learning how to use Adobe Photo Shop Elements. I've messed around before with 'Paint', but this is a much bigger program, and it is going to take some doing on my part to develop some self taught skills.

While I may be a tad in awe of this whole undertaking that I've managed to commit myself to doing, I do think it will be fun. I'm going to be using lots of problem solving skills and exercising my brain but good!

I've spent a good portion of the afternoon just messing around with Photo Shop and reading what I can in the instruction portion of the software. I long for the good old days of a nice written manual that you can hold in your hands and take with you to study. Somehow, I just don't want to run off the fifty some pages on my printer.

I'm going to have to do some serious organizing in my head about how to scan and organize the pictures in the computer so I can find them easily. There will be a lot of pictures.

I've about had it for today, so will try to clear the cobwebs out of my brain and come back for another round tomorrow.