Happy Anniversary

Today is my second wedding anniversary to the most amazing man :)

I have made these in honour of him.

To many, many more years.

:) Roon-bop

Photoshop Christmas Tutorials

Oh my goodness, I can't even believe my luck!

First I go to the store, because we're out of liquid hand soap, and low and behold, my favourite liquid hand soap is on sale! And there are 5 left. Very lucky me.

This morning, just this very morning, my husband asks me if I can help him create a company Christmas card with Photoshop. I'm a little lost on how I'm going to do it, but I know I'll figure something out. Then I get back from lunch and find this link! 24 Free Photoshop Christmas tutorials... seriously... my mind is blown.

So I thought I would share it, which conveniently enough also places it somewhere I can easily find it when I get home. This is amazing. I took a brief look at them. I wanted to create an ornament and have the company logo in the centre. And there is a tutorial on how to create a Christmas ornament... I mean really I'm a little freaked out by all this.

I hope this is as helpful to you as it should be to me. And thanks to toxel.com and digg.com for posting it.

Happy December First!
:) Roon-bop

Photoshop Class

Alright, well I am in class as I write this.  It is break.  I got called out today in class for this panorama I put together.  No skill was involved (automatic stitching) and it is far from perfect, however, considering the difficult of the shot (many seats, many people) it did a pretty good job.  The teach told the class to come 'round and have a look at my shot, which is both pretty cool & pretty embarrassing... such is life.  And of course, because of the width of the panorama, it will come up very small.

Now I shall share it with you.

:) Roon-bop

Some work from class

I thought I'd post a couple of the pictures I submitted in class for my assignment. This was assignment #3, extracting & melding images.

I'm really looking forward to next class. We're going to start learning about panoramas and HDRs. I think that's what they are call... High Definition something...

On another note, I am currently working on creating my very first business cards. Staples is having a sale! WOO HOO!

:) Roon-bop

Last Week's Class

So after much internal debate, I have decided to show what I learned in last week's Photoshop class. The reason for the debate is that we learned to remove wrinkles, and as such I will be posting a photo of my mother, that will in turn ask my dear readers to notice how many she has, and how amazing I am for making her look better.

Let me just preface by saying that I think my mother looks great for her age (wrinkles and all). I am a firm believer that people should embrace aging and try to do it as gracefully as possible and always naturally. People seem to forget that not everyone has the chance to grow old.

So, last week we used the healing brush, Gaussian blur & diffused glow. Original will be first followed by my work.

:) Roon-bop


Original

Gaussian Blur

Diffused Glow

Original

Healing Brush

PS Curves Tutorial

Hello,

Well, as you may or may not know, I missed the second half of my photoshop class last week. Because I was missing it, my teacher suggested that I watch some tutorials on You Tube to learn more about Curves. I found this tutorial and found it to be very useful. I had NO idea before I watched this. Me thinks I shall be using curves much more often & more effectively from now on.

:) Roon-bop

The Joker

Alright, well the other night when I posted my TIFF photos, I purposely left these two out because I thought I'd say a few words about them.

They are in fact, the exact same photo. I was enhancing the photo in PS, and then decided that I would fool around with it a little more, because it was a photo with many colours and is a photograph of street art. So, I was playing around with hue and saturation when I got the below result. What I love about it, is the maple leaves that just scream out at you... They are so obscure in the first photo and by playing around with the saturation I was able to have them pop out so they are the feature of the photo.

I just think its interesting to see the difference that can come out of the same shot. This may inspire me to use PS a little more dramatically in the future... we'll see.

:) Roon-bop

School

Well, I can't believe it! I'm beginning classes again in 8 days! My how the summer flew by.

So, starting Wednesday September 3rd, I will be taking Photography II, which is another Photoshop class. Hopefully it is good. I know that I will see at least a couple friendly faces, which will be nice.

Will keep you posted!

:) Roon-bop

Restoration Project

So, I realized that I have yet to upload my final restoration project from my photoshop class. Turns out I got 100% on it... that is not to say that it is flawless, but that I was able to obtain perfect marks in night classes.

This is a picture of my Nanny (Beatrice Larmour). She passed away many years ago, when I was not yet a teenager. We were quite close. She is 16 years old in this picture.

It was much easier to fix once the teacher showed us the patch tool.

:) Roon-bop

Original:

Restoration:

Others

Okay, here are some other photos that came up on the blog in messed up colours. I figured instead of just going back and fixing them, I'd pop them in their own little section, cause they go back a little further.

There's the magazine cover which I submitted to my Photoshop class, and 2 pictures I submitted for my photography 1 class: DS Stack and De Minimis Maximus Portrait.

So, what is the lesson to be had here? When saving pictures for photoblog, in Photoshop "save for web and devises." I know, I should have figured that out WAY sooner... I'm such a noob.

:) Roon-bop

Intro to Digital Imaging - Finito

Well, its a sad sad day... classes are over. Luckily there will be other Photoshop classes to take.

I've uploaded my final test. I'm PISSED... I got home and showed Curtis and the first thing I saw was the n from the word design was cut off.... I hadn't even noticed because of the scratched up computer screens in the George Brown labs... ARGH! I KNEW I should have left 1/4 inch on the ends, but I thought that because it was such a small canvas a 1/4 inch would be too much... ah well. As my fellow Ottawa native Alanis Morrisette sang to us: "You live, you learn"

In any case, regardless of my fudge, I'm quite proud of the results. We were asked to create a flyer for our business in one hour and 15 minutes. We needed to use at least two images and use text. I used three images. The picture of the bedroom, the frame which I placed above the bed and the picture I took of my dog, within the frame. Then I added the grey background for the bottom portion, added some pretty text, because pretty is pretty.

I like it, hopefully you do too. Just remember, I know I screwed up with the damn wording... I'm so upset, because it was so pretty otherwise. Ah well.

All in all, I really enjoyed the class and am glad I took it. I really felt like I learned a lot. I would recommend this class to anyone, but it would be remedial for any one who knows anything about Photoshop. Also, the teacher: Derrick Hayes was great. I actually enjoyed that his background wasn't photography.

:) Roon-bop

Photoshop - Week 6

Today was my second last Photoshop class. That means that today my magazine cover was due. I thought I would share my creation with you. Don't bother looking for it on newsstands anytime soon: This is a Roon-Boppin' Photography Adventure exclusive! Okay, well I just posted it, and the colour is all messed up... not sure why, but I guess you'll just have to imagine it with colour... sorry.

:(

Next is photo restoration. I haven't worked on that at all, but it needs to get done this week because I'm out of town this weekend. Luckily, I have all night Tuesday and Wednesday.

Thursday is my final Photography 1 class. I am sad. I've picked my photos and will post them after I present them to my classmates on Thursday evening, so stay tuned for that! I still have to get them on CD, and also I have to pick a couple more. I don't really feel like my pictures are up to snuff... I kinda of feel like I'm not where I should be. Perhaps because I look at other people's photos in the class & feel inadequate. All this shows is that I have more to learn, more to practice and more to experience. I am a complete noob in photography and many of the people in my class are not. Hopefully I don't embarrass myself come Thursday.

:) Roon-bop

Photoshop Week 4

In this week's class, we didn't really learn much new. We went over some stuff that we learned the week before and spent a lot of time working on our assignments. So, I spent some time trying to restore some old photos my parents and aunt gave me. I tried to restore colour in a couple pictures of my mother in the 70's. I wasn't very successful in the first one, but the second one it better. It's very difficult to get that 70's orange hue out. The third picture is an old black and white of my dad and aunt. It was purely restoration touch ups. I think it turned out really well. It was a pretty easy one, but I think I did a good job on the shoe.

First will be the original, then the restoration:

:) Roon-bop

Photoshop - Week 3

Tonight's class was LOTS of fun!! :) We learned how to use the stamp tool to duplicate an image, how to fix up an old photo & how to add colour to a black and white photo. Basically the images below will do all the talking. Again, please keep in mind that I only have limited time to do this work in, so it's not perfect. I was just having some fun.

The first image was made by using the stamping tool to duplicate the image, which I then flipped. I also used the stamp tool for the hats & mic stand in the center.

The 3 images afterwards show progression of what I learned re: fixing up an old photo & adding colour. The first picture is the original old picture (from Photoshop stock photos) and the work that I did on it in the second two.

I had lots of fun and I'm excited to play around more with these tools. We also spoke about our final assignments. We will need to show these skills in it. One is to fix up an old photo & add colour, and the other assignment is to create a photo magazine cover. Should be fun!

:) Roon-bop

First Day of Class

Well, I am back home from my first day of Intro to Digital Imaging and I have to say that it was better than I was expecting. I thought for sure it would be completely remedial "This is how you scan a photo"; "This is how you get a photo from a CD", etc. But we jumped right into to Photoshop. We learned a few of the basic tools (nothing you wouldn't find in the Paint application). But we took some images and cropped and layered. It was really great! The teacher Derrick Haynes, was very good at going through things. I think that I picked up on it pretty well and I'm really excited for next week's class. Now all I need is Photoshop C3 so I can practice at home... but of course, its SO expensive!!! I'll have to see what I can do about that. It's fun. Most the class time was him showing us things, but at the end we were given some time to play around. Attached you will see my first Photoshop picture... I didn't have a whole lot of time, and there are some pretty obvious mistakes (some cropping, some size issues) but whatever, here it is none the less.

Things to note about the picture: The crop of Hilary & Barack was mostly cropped using an auto crop and the picture of Curtis and Dimi was done all by my hand. I wanted to ask the teacher how I can use the delete function in small areas where the brush stroke is too big. I'm sure if I had more time to play around with it I would have found a place to adjust that, but alas...

My biggest thing is that I need to be more aggressive in getting the teacher's attention. He tends to focus on students who didn't understand what he was teaching, but I have questions about how to make things look better, etc, trying to learn as much as I possible can. I just need to maybe speak up and schedule time after class to stick around and ask questions once the people who didn't get it are gone. But of course, all I want to do is get home to Curtis and Dimi... so I'm just going to have to remember that there are only 7 classes, 7 weeks, so I think I can put in an extra half hour or so at the end of class.

Stayed tuned to hear all about Thursday's class: Intro to Digital Photography!!!

:) Roon-bop