Happy Mother’s Day ladies! Are you all frazzled from the NSD festivities? I know I am. I feel like a chicken with my head cut off. I hope your husbands have taken your beloved children to the park and you are reading this blog post with a muffin and a coffee in a perfectly quiet house. That’s my dream anyway. I know it won’t happen but a girl can dream right?
Anyhow, back to Snappin’ Sundays. As I was looking through the gallery this morning admiring all the beautiful layouts, a thought occurred to me. The layouts that appeal to me the most are layouts where the artist has matched the tones of their picture to the tones of the kit.
Here’s what I mean. I prepared a little cluster with a combination of elements from Meet me at the Rainbow and Boys Only by Jazzmin Designs, one of our guests this month. Here is my cluster with the photo I would like to use. The only edit I did to this photo is to make a Levels Adjustment to set the light and dark points of the photo. The cluster looks OK like this but not great.
Now here is the that very same cluster with the very same photo but lightened up a great deal.
It just looks better right? If you are drawn to light colored kits, like I am, you will probably end up lightening up a lot of your photos. Here is the method I use a lot for summer photos that were taken outside. Here is the photo I will be working with for this exercise.
First, I’m going to lighten up the photo by duplicating my Background layer, changing my blend mode to Screen, and changing my opacity to somewhere between 40% and 60%. Sometimes I’m happy with just this adjustment alone. However, just for fun, I’m going to show you how to add some haze to your photos.
The next step is completely optional. Because I can see the sun streaming into my photo from the top right, I decided to add some lens flare to the photo to create some additional interest. To add some lens flare, you will need to create another duplicate copy of the Background layer. In my example, I’ve called this layer Lens Flare. I’ve put it right below the Lighten layer we created in the step above. You can find the Lens Flare screen by following these menu items: Filter>Render>Lens Flare. You now have some options as to the brightness, position, and type of lens flare you want to add to your photo. I chose to keep the default setting except I changed the position of the lens flare by pulling the cursor I’ve circled a little to the left.
The next step is to add some Haze by adding a very simple Levels Adjustment layer by clicking on the white and black circle at the bottom of the Layers Panel. The only adjustment we will do on this layer is to pull the output level that I’ve circled to the right until your photo is hazy enough for you.
I like the Haze effect of this photo now but I’ve sacrificed some contrast to get here so I’m going to add a bit of contrast back in. To do this, I’m going to once again duplicate my Background layer. This time I’m going to change the blending mode to Soft Light and the opacity to somewhere between 40% and 60%. I chose 48%.
I wanted to play a bit more so I added a Photo Filter adjustment layer (also found by clicking on the white/black circle at the bottom of the Layers Panel). I went with a Warming Filter (85) to add a bit more of a sunny feel to my picture. Here is my result.
I then wanted to play a bit more with some of Valorie Wibbens’ Confetti overlays. She has two super cute packs in the store: Circles and Hearts.
Here’s my picture with the confetti circles. I just placed the overlay on top of my photo, resized it to fit my image, and then masked off any of the confetti that fell directly on my little man.
Here is my photo with the confetti hearts.
I hope you’ve found this little tutorial useful. I know my images look a little off. I sized them to be 900 X 600 but this blog only seems to accept 900 X 525 so my images have been squished. I need to go put my kiddos to bed so I can’t change my images to make them pretty. My apologies.
Go enjoy the rest of your Mother’s Day and NSD.
Happy Shopping!
Tiki
deborah says
thanks for the editing mini-tut, I tend to forget about that dang lens flare :)