Photoshop Sisters

Hard Light

I'm more than slightly jealous that Lucy is already enjoying the spring blossoms where she lives.  I live a bit more northerly than her and they are talking about some snow falling tomorrow. *sigh*  But we're here to talk about photo editing, not weather, so let's get to work.

Here are the beautiful blossoms in front of Lucy's local post office:

Last week, The Pioneer Woman showed one of her favorite, yet incredibly simple tools.  Hard light.  AND, you can do it on both Photoshop Elements, as well as Photoshop CS.  You can read her tutorial here.  She's a bit wordy at first, but if you stick with it, she finally cuts to the chase and shows you with lots of step-by-step pictures on  how to do it.  What it all comes down to is creating a new layer and then selecting "Hard Light" in the blending menu in the Layers corner on your screen.  Here's what it looks like on the blossoms:

It just gives a little punch and deepness to the colors.  When you add the feathering around the edging like we talked about a few weeks ago, here's what you get:

Before and After:

Lucy had to do her own editing session on this photo and she shows it on her blog.  It just goes to show you the endless possibilities of photo editing!

Lots 'o stuff in one simple tutorial

Lesa Snider King might be my new best friend.

I discovered her while looking for interesting tutorials on Photoshop Elements to see what I might do with this photo that Lucy sent me this week:

I ended up at the Photoshop Elements Support website and learned how to use several cool features in just one tutorial by Lesa.

This is what I ended up with:

Kind of funky, eh?  What blows me away, though, is that when the photo is pulled up in Photoshop Elements (I'm assuming that all of this could be done in Photoshop CS, as well) you can drag the white framed section to other parts of the photo and make whatever part you want turn from black and white to color.  It's seems pretty fancy, but luckily Lesa gave some really clear instructions and even I was able to follow them.  Seriously, if I can do it, anyone can.

Go check it out for yourself by clicking here.