why i love photoshop

this original photo came from heather, of double h photo. she was the official photographer at pathfinder days 2010, and she passed along a few of our little group as we competed throughout the day, and i'm really hoping to get a few more. (hint, hint ;-) )

anyway, so this one is scott and myself on my mare april competing in the rescue race. scott ran down to pick me up at the opposite end of the arena, and i managed to get on, and i also managed to not get completely centered before we took off, but this is when we still had the illusion of everything pulled together. i really liked the photo, so i took it into photoshop and did this a few weeks ago:

a little bit of a crop to make it more facebook profile picture-friendly, a little bit of lighten, a little bit of sharpen, a little bit of color boost, thanks to a few of pioneer woman's free photoshop actions. take them, download them, install them and use them. they're wonderful.

then, i got to playing around with the same photo again, as it's a favorite of mine, with scott and myself having a good time doing the kind of thing we love to do together. i'm thinking i want to incorporate it somehow into 'save the dates' or something like that for wedding announcements. or maybe just print it and enjoy it. but anyway, i took my time cutting it out, especially on april's tail, and this is what i had at that point, cut out from the first raw image:

but, that in and of itself was a little boring, so i came up with several options, also using pw's photoshop actions to help me along the way. some of the effects were subtle, like the faint blurring of the edges on this one:

and some were not so sublte, like this one. while i wouldn't probably try to print it, except maybe in very high-quality ink and paper, i kinda like the metallic aspect of it. it's pw's 'vintage' action, which shows up a little different on this than most photos because of the nature of my cut-out:

and this was the last one, and the one that has scott's vote:

he likes old-timey looking western photographs, and i think this effect suits the photo perfectly.


find pw's free photoshop actions here.