How I See Life » Collage

Before and After

Kari — Tue, 13 Apr 2010 03:27:30 +0000

I don’t usually do much Photoshopping of the pictures that I take. I shoot in RAW and I post-process, but that’s only using Canon’s free Digital Photo Pro app, and usually the only thing I really do in there is sharpen and tinker with white balance.

But for the photo shoot I did of my coworkers grandkids a couple of Fridays ago, I knew I’d need more than just a couple of quick adjustments in DPP to get anything I was really happy with. The shoot’s conditions were less than ideal (rain caused a move indoors, I didn’t have a wide enough angle lens to capture two small moving objects in a small living room so I spent a lot of the shoot with my back pressed against the wall, and I suck at using my flash, but I didn’t have much of a choice since I was indoors and the lighting wasn’t great.)

Photoshopping these things was fairly time-consuming. I’m not that great with Photoshop to begin with, and I’m stubborn and picky, so a job I thought was going to take 3-4 hours instead took around 8. (But hey, I finally understand what curves are in Photoshop and how to use them! Go me!) in At 4:30 this morning I finally hit submit on the blog post prior to this and turned off my laptop, more or less happy with what I had (and slightly paranoid that I’d look at the pictures in daylight and realized I’d over-processed them… Hey, I’ve done that before!)

But as the day wore on, I glanced at them a couple of times, and I was still satisfied with what I’d come out with, so I decided to post a few before and after pictures just so y’all could see just how bad they were when they came off the camera compared to the final product.

I don’t normally openly solicit comments on here, but if you wanted to comment on this particular post about what you thought worked and didn’t, please do. :-) After this post, I’ll have one more post with pictures from this shoot, and I have kind of a fun one planned for that. So stay tuned… whenever I get around to it. :-)

Click the link for more…

Back seat perspective

Kari — Mon, 13 Apr 2009 06:18:02 +0000

I took these on the way to my sister’s house on Friday, after she picked me up from the airport. My niece faces backwards in her car seat right now (she’s not old enough to face it forward) and so my sister put up a mirror on the seat so that she can look in the rear-view mirror and see what my niece is up to. I had fun with the perspective on this, although it was a lot harder to get these pictures than it looks (moving car+me stuck in a seatbelt+baby behind the driver’s seat=hard to get a picture.)

Annie in her car seat.

Annie collage

Kari — Wed, 11 Feb 2009 14:10:28 +0000

Annie collage, originally uploaded by Kari_Marie.

Picasa makes some wicked awesome collages. Seriously, I couldn’t resist making this. :-D

I made a collage!

Kari — Wed, 11 Feb 2009 13:44:23 +0000

Dad’s collage, originally uploaded by Kari_Marie.

I know, this may not sound like much… After spending time in Photoshop and getting irritated because (a) it’s hideously slow (on my laptop) and (b) I couldn’t get everything to line up right, I realized Picasa does the job quite efficiently. :facepalm:

Oh well, I love how this turned out. :-) It’s my dad meeting his granddaughter for the first time.