Advanced Beginner Tutorials: Photos Forward

The digiscrapping primer I collated for you all at then end of October was pretty well-received. So for today, I’ve put together a baker’s dozen selection of advanced-beginner tutorials that all revolve around photos. Most of our layouts will have at least one photo, and sometimes the right photo isn’t actually quite… right. So here are some ways of making your photos work with you layouts better.

Remember that each of these is hyperlinked to the original post so you can find them easier. Just click on the bold, coloured, underlined text and your magic carpet awaits.

The first one I’m showing you is a Basic Photo Editing workflow. It’s for those photos that are okay, but could be great. Simple tweaks can make a big difference.

We’ve all got photos where the brilliance of a smile is literally outshone by reflected light on a forehead or a nose. There’s actually a Cosmetic-Free Mattifying process that’s pretty effective but easy too.

What about those photos where there just isn’t enough light on a face? We can fix that too! Exposing the Underexposed shows how I do it. (Unless I’ve already adjusted everything in my phone…)

Here are some tips for using those almost-okay photos when they’re all you have of something you really want to scrap… but don’t really want to scrap – the ones I call the Ho Hum Shots.

If you’re at all like me and have been designated the Keeper of the Family History, you’ve probably got a Rubbermaid tub filled with what we’ll call heritage photos. They are true treasures but aren’t always exemplary. But they can be better! Enhancing Heritage Photos shows you how.

Colour photography can produce completely stunning images, but the real art of photography is revealed in black and white. There are a couple of ways to turn a dramatic colour shot into a Moody Black and White image.

Expanding on black and white artistry, you can play with Selective Colouring. You can colour one flower in a huge bouquet to make it stand out, or colour just the eyes in a portrait. It’s fun and can be really stunning.

Now, let’s suppose you want to use only one face in a group shot, or the background is distracting so you want to neutralize it. To achieve those goals, you’d do a Simple Extraction (not to be confused with dentistry) of the part you want to keep.

And then there’s the very trendy out-of-bounds look of Partial Extraction that allows you to have a soccer player kicking a ball outside a frame, or a hand reaching out of a photo and picking flowers from a cluster. Such a fun look!

An important thing to remember when using landscape photos containing water is that water MUST be level to look right. If a waterline is tilted, one’s mind imagines it running our of the photo. 🙁 Our brains also struggle when walls or doorframes are leaning. But you can make those images Plumb and Level!

But… how do we know When to Stop Editing? It’s really easy to go too far and end up with actual dreck. This is why my fingers just know where CTRL/CMD>Z lives on the keyboard!

The last two on my list are about using those photos after you’ve fixed ’em up. You can stretch a group photo or landscape so One Photo Fills Multiple Photo Spots. And the other is how to Blend a Photo into a Background.

What to do you think? Should I put all the Quick Tricks in one place? How about all the title/word art/font posts? Let me know!