Touch Up Tuesday: Crop’s Up

We had a great weekend and I hope to get an entry up about it soon, but before that I want to write up an entry for a new photographic bloghop I found, Touch Up Tuesday on The Bonnie 5! It’s a great blog I heartily recommend you subscribe to! There are lots of bloghops going on today! For more inspiration, please check out my Be Inspired page.

This is the result I was happiest with out of this weekend’s batch of photos. Here’s the SOOC:

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Not Friday Finds: Low Angles

I’ve made a lot of changes to the site lately and I think I need to stop before it implodes upon itself. I’ve had so many errors today that I haven’t had any time to work on an actual post. Instead I’m going to share some awesome links and photos with you to make up for the fact that I skipped the last two Friday Finds.

The photos used throughout this post are taken by others and licensed under Creative Commons. The theme is low angle shots. For more low angle shots I collected, check out my Low Angle Shots Gallery on Flickr!

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Photoshop Workflow Tips

These tips are specific to Photoshop CS3. Usually things don’t change too much across versions, but I welcome comments if it works differently in another version.

I’ve spent a lot of time this week just organizing my PhotoShop settings so that it doesn’t take an eternity for me to edit pictures. These tips helped me make the most out of my Photoshop configuration.

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History Palette Helps with Workflow

I’ve spent the past few days ignoring the pending articles I have to write and concentrating on a new index layout. I wanted something more in the style of a magazine and though I searched high and low for a WordPress theme that would meet my needs, I did not like any of the options. So I tore the WordPress loop inside and out, dusted off my PHP skills and coded the front page the way I wanted it to be. I still have some minor tweaks and improvements here and there, but it’s a pretty cool piece of work if I do say so myself! Please take a look and let me know what you think!

I’m not even going to pretend like I know all the ins and outs of using the history palette, but over the past week I’ve found using snapshots to be an invaluable improvement to my workflow. In this article, I’ll explain how I used snapshots to work on editing the photo above and how to set up a shortcut to take a snapshot. But first, one needs to know what a snapshot is and how to take one.

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I Heart Faces: Fix it Friday #58

Folks, I am days behind in editing photos. Because of this, there will be no Friday Finds this week. I’m sorry! You can browse through previous weeks and check out my currently surfing page if you want to find some great links!

This week I purchased Patti Brown’s Kaleidoscope Light Set and MCP Action’s Quickie Collection and All in the Details. For serious, I would buy just about everything the two of them have to offer if I could. Now that I’ve downloaded a bazillion actions and textures, it takes me 12 times as long to edit a photo because I’m trying to learn how to use them. The learning curve is also why a lot of my photos are coming out over-processed lately. It takes experience to be able to predict how a photo is going to respond to an action and be able to subtly tweak it.

Despite the fact that I may never finish editing photos from Wednesday, I got all giddy when I remembered (thanks to Newbie Photo Lover) that it is Fix it Friday!

The picture this week is an absolutely gorgeous self-portrait taken by Susan Keller of Short on Words. It has a natural sun flare in the upper right hand corner which I think is awesome. So many photographers view sun flares as horrible mistakes they should have corrected when setting up the shot, but I completely disagree. Immediately I was excited to be able to play off the light in this photo with some of the Kaleidoscope Light Set overlays!

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