Playing with Photoshop
Two years ago I bought Photoshop Elements to help me manage and enhance the photos of my art pieces for my website I was writing at the time.
I use it almost every day now and am still learning what this software has to offer. Every new “thing” I discover still amazes me. To that end I decided to take a few pics of myself and manipulate them….with threshold, tinting, cropping, adjusting, all sorts of different things. It’ so cool to have a new toy to play with without having spent a dime.
I read a lot of blogs and I happened upon one that talked about using threshold (sorry I don’t remember whose blog it was, my connection timed out and I lost the pages I was looking at when computer had to reboot).
In it’s simplest form threshold removes colour and reverts everything to black and white. It’s a bit more complicated than that but hey, that’s enough explanation for me. Here’s the first of my play time learning session.
I absolutely love how this came out!
I don’t actually like having pictures taken of me and will avoid them at all costs so the fact that I can take pieces of these pics and crop them is cool. The original photo was a full face shot.
This next one I cropped, posterized and re-coloured purple. Who knew that purple would look so cute on me?
I read somewhere that when cropping a person you should try to include only those things that are important in the photo. I cropped real close so that the subject (me) was the center of the pic and nothing would distract from it. Not bad really.
Of course I had to get a pic of my hands….parts of my body that I am thankful for everyday. With these hands I get to create and touch and love and speak my soul with.
This is another photo playing with threshold. I love the play of light and dark with this tool. I went back and forth manipulating my lips it seems like forever. Did you know that most black women are not happy with this part of their face. I have never been one of those women. It’s something I tell my daughter all the time…be happy with who you are…cause girl there’s no repeats.
And last but not least, an un-enhanced photo of me. I hesitated putting this one in and told myself to “get over it!” Pictures are meant to be seen, not hidden,right?
These photos were all taken by me with the timer on my camera. You do not want to know how many were erased because my head was cut off or only half of me was in the shot. Okay so a professional photographer I am not….but I can still play.
Go on, I dare ya….take some shots of yourself and play.
See ya next time “In the Hayloft”,
