New Skillz

We’re coming to the end of the first week of the Photo Editing course I’m taking at JessicaSprague.com.  (This was the free one I mentioned a couple of weeks ago.)  Verdict?  Oh my wow.

Short review: If you want more photoshop skills, take a class from Jessica.

I’ve been using Photoshop Elements for digital scrapbooking for about three-and-a-half years now, and I think I do okay.  The problem is, I’m self-taught, through trial and error, so I’ve missed a lot along the way.  This class, which is called “Frame-Ups and Special Effects” is backfilling a few things I missed, and introducing me to new ways to use some products I’ve skimmed over in the past.

Some of the things I’ve done for class this week:

This is really simple, just adding some word art and a frame to a photo I took in Wyoming, when Jason and I were driving across country.  However, I’ll admit that putting the elements on the photo hasn’t really occurred to me before.  Lesson 1: Thinking outside the box (or frame, as it were).

This next assignment is the one that had me bouncing in my seat when I completed it yesterday.  This is a photo taken on the same drive across country, in the little town of Collyer, Kansas.  This is the town my grandfather was born in.  His grandparents settled there after the civil war.  Unfortunately, it isn’t a particularly thriving community anymore, but a number of my ancestors are buried in the town cemetery, so when I noticed that we’d be driving right by on our way across Kansas (I mean literally – the freeway is practically adjacent to the cemetary), I begged Jason to stop.  This is the Catholic school house:

Yesterday’s lesson involved applying textures over photographs.  I’ve used textures – on paper.  Again, putting them over photos hadn’t entered my brain.

Such fun!  One of the ladies in the class was doing great things with textures over her wedding photos.  I can’t wait to get going on that one of these days…

Today, Jessica showed us TTV (Through The Viewfinder) textures, which are supposed to give the feel of photographs taken with antique cameras.  In honor of Kalen’s birthday yesterday, I decided to play around with a photo of him when he was teensy.  (He was only a day or two old here.)

The texture is by Steffen Jakob, and I only altered it by using the Dodge Tool a bit over Kalen’s face, to reduce the graininess a bit.

Obviously, I’m having fun with this.  I can’t see making many of my pictures look antique for the scrapping I’ll be doing, but the wheels are beginning to turn as to how I can apply some of these techniques subtly for effect.