Photoshop, etc...

What started out to be an ordinary day quickly turned into a wild goose chase to find the perfect Christmas dresses in my girls' sizes. I have this perpetual problem of picking the one thing that is impossible to find and today that thing was a specific dress for Adi in her size. Four Target stores later and most of my day eaten up, I settled on second best and rushed home to make our photo shoot appointment. What I mean by "appointment" is calling on our talented young cousin Zac to use our camera for a half-an-hour while we attempt to get all four of us to look at the camera and smile at the same time. (Thanks Zac!)

Well, he did a great job and combined with some fantastic photoshop tutorials I found online, I was able to pull together our card design and get the order into the print shop.

Here is our final card design for 2011,

I searched the web for inspiration and created this file in Adobe Illustrator. You can find a more detailed tutorial here complete with sources on how to create your own cards.

This is the original photo that we chose straight out of the camera,

Its a great photo, just needed a little tweaking. I found a really informative list of photoshop tutorials from experienced photographers here.

The first effect I tried was the "Soft Focus & Glow Effect" -- tutorial found here.

Next, I tried the "Lomo Photography Effect" -- tutorial found here.

And lastly, I tried the "Vintage Photo Effect" -- tutorial found here.

This was my favorite even though we didn't choose it for the card.


I hope this was helpful! Tomorrow, the plan is to clean my house from the whirlwind of a day today and hopefully get to finishing my paint project. Goodnight :)


Lots of love,
Mary

p.s. My sincere apologies for any typos or grammatical errors. My Editor in Chief aka Handsome Husband has gone to bed for the night, so I am left to my own devises.