free class from jessica sprague

Guys, check out this free class by Jessica Sprague!

Jessica has compiled a class where she teaches five different awesome things you can do with Photoshop. Way cool!


(Click on the image to go directly to the class)

Don't miss it!

Italy album sneak peek number two

I am still plugging away on my Italy album. I had to take a couple of weeks' break and now I'm up to 28 pages (or 14 spreads). I just finished day four of the trip. Whew! I think I'll get to somewhere around 60 - 70 pages when I'm finished (so if someone happens to own Shutterfly, give me a heads up, ok).

I am doing mostly multi photo pages but am trying to liven it up a little with some full bleed photos. So here is the second sneak peek, also a full bleed. The photo was taken in Siena. I made the word art, which by the way actually looks like word art with grunge and everything when it is much bigger than this.


Thanks for the comments y'all have made for me in the last couple of days. Lots of love!

Photoshop tip - Improve exposure to part of a photo with a gradient layer mask

Whew that was a long title! But that is exactly what this tip is about. We will improve the exposure to a certain part of a photo by using a layer mask.

As you all know I was recently in Italy and had the chance to take lots and lots of photos of beautiful places. Of course not all of them came out looking like spreads from a magazine. But no worries, right, since our beloved Photoshop can help me improve my shots by a long way. Don't we just love it?

So, here is my original photo of the duomo in Florence. Beautiful building. Huge. Difficult to shoot at noon in the scorching sun.


See how the building itself is pretty decent looking? I metered off the building when I took the photo but in doing so the sky was blown out and pale. This makes the overall impression of the photo pretty blah. Let's see what we can do to improve this.
(Please note that I use the Swedish version of Photoshop so all you English speaking people, please don't be confused.)

1. Open your photo in Photoshop


2. The first thing we have to do is to add an adjustment layer. An adjustment layer will give us the chance to edit without touching the original layer and that is good because if we change our minds we can just delete the adjustment layer and everything will be back to normal or we can do further edits to that individual layer. Click on the little circle icon for adjustment layers in the layers palette and choose levels.


3. Pull the black slider as far to the right as needed to darken your blown out portion just enough to make it look good again. One thing to remember is to not go too crazy here but to make it match the colour and exposure of the rest of the photo.


4. As you can see by the image above by doing so we have automatically darkened the everything else as well. Of course we don’t want this so to remedy that we will use the gradient tool on the layer we just created. In the layers palette click on the layer mask icon to make sure the layer mask is activated. You can see that it is by the frame around the icon.


5. Now press G to access the gradient tool. If you have the paint bucket activated in the tool bar you might have to change it to the gradient tool.


6. Click on the small arrow next to the preview of the gradient type in the options bar. Choose black, white from the fly out menu. Then choose linear gradient which is the button furthest to the left out of the five buttons to the right of the preview.


7. You will now get a cross hair marker. Click and drag a line from where you want the gradient to start to where you want it to end to make a selection of where the layer mask should be doing its magic. In my case this is from the top of the building to the top of the photo as it is the sky part of the photo that I want the layer mask to be active.


8. When you let go you will see that Hey Presto! the rest of the photo will be back to the original exposure. In the layers palette you will also see that the mask is black at and then fades to white. The black part hides the levels adjustment we did in the first step and the white shows it.


9. Depending on your individual photo you might have to do some cleaning up where the mask meets the original layer to make it look really good. You can use the dodge/burn tool for this.

Here is my edited photo. Better, no?


Have a go at this, it is so easy but effective. I would love to see your results so if you do try it out then link me up!

Have a great day everyone!

POTD 9

Anyone who knows me can attest to my life long love of ice cream. As a small child I would eat so much ice cream that my stomach would get so cold that I had to spend hours in the bathroom. LOL, I have learnt to restrain myself now but I still love it.

Again, with the colour pop

I stumbled across yet another colour pop tip and this one I liked so much that I had to put it here. It's a live video, and be warned - the sound is horrible, that shows from start to finish how to edit a photo to bring out the colour without getting "lobster people", lol.

Check it out!

Colour pop tip

I found an article that presented a great way of making the colours of your photo pop in Photoshop and thought I would share. A quick and easy way of doing it is using hue/saturation. This way is a little more work but looks beautiful.

1. Duplicate layer and set the blending mode to multiply. Set the opacity to 15%.
2. Duplicate layer again and set the blending mode to soft light. Set the opacity to 20%.

The first layer will make the colours stronger and the second layer will up the contrast.

Go ahead and try it and let me know what you think!