This one makes me laugh out loud and smile at the same time! Love all the colors and the adorable pic is fabulous!! Congrats to jennschultz for this beautiful page!

To leave her some love, you can click the image. =)

She used the items from the Visions of Sugar Plums Grab Bag  by Cluster Queen Creations and geniaBeana.  Look for those items to be sold separately soon!!

 

 

I absolutely fell in love this one…Or maybe I am just a sucker for anything with snowmen!!
Hexagonal Box by majula76.

 

You can click the image to leave her some love and if you like this gift box idea, check out this Hexagonal Box Template by Simply J Studio:

 

The holidays are just around the corner and for most of us, that means lots of pictures! Often, our holiday pictures include beautiful lights. Even if you don’t celebrate Christmas, strands of Christmas lights can make a fun backdrop for a picture. Here are a few tips for using lights in your photographs this holiday season.

 USING LIGHTS AS A BACKDROP

Christmas lights are a really fun way to add some interest to your backdrop. Place them over or under a sheer fabric and use the tips I’ve already shared for making your background blurry. This will create a sparkly look.

Lights under the fabric:

Lights on top of the fabric:

You can see that in the second set of photos, I got in closer to make the background blurrier. This is because you don’t want the cords from the lights to be noticeable when the lights are on top of your backdrop.

You don’t need an elaborate backdrop or setup in order to use lights as a background for your photos, though. Simply use your Christmas tree!

In order to get those big, round circles from your lights, remember the blurry background tips!

 

PHOTOGRAPHING YOUR CHRISTMAS TREE

For most of us, the focal point of our holiday decorations is the tree, so here are a few tips for getting great photos of your Christmas tree.

Turn off your flash! Your flash drowns out the pretty lights and makes crazy shadows everywhere. In these two examples, I used auto mode for both and simply turned off the flash in the second one. See what a difference it makes?

Use a high ISO. Increasing your ISO will make your camera more sensitive to light, allowing you to get a better exposure in such a dark setting. Even most point and shoot cameras allow you to change the ISO setting. 

Use a very small aperture. The smaller your aperture (the larger the number), the more “twinkly” the lights will look. Remember, if you are not comfortable in manual mode, you can use aperture priority. You can see in these photos (cropped close for comparison), how the star burst effect gets larger as the aperture gets smaller.

Remember, if your aperture is really small, you are letting in much less light and you will need to boost your ISO up very high. You will also need to have a slow shutter speed in order to get a correct exposure, which brings us to…..

Use a slow shutter speed (and a tripod!). In order to let in all that beautiful, twinkly light, you will need to use a slower shutter speed. The following pictures show you how shutter speed effects your photo.

Remember, when your shutter speed is very slow, movement (either from the person holding the camera, or the subjects in the photo) can ruin the picture. You will probably want to use a tripod to eliminate camera shake. If you are including a person in your photo, you will need to ask them to hold very still. If you are including a little person who doesn’t know the meaning of “hold very still”, you will need to sacrifice some of the “twinkly-ness” of the lights (by using a larger aperture to let in more light) in order to have a higher shutter speed.

Here are a couple more examples, along with their settings:

There you go… now you’re all set to go out and take some fabulous holiday photos! Don’t forget to use them in a layout and post them in the gallery so that we can see them too!

 

 

 

Monday ONLY!! Select items are 50% off!! Visit the ScrapMatters Shop for more details!!
*Sale runs 12am-11:59pm ET. HURRY! What are you waiting for!?! *

Hi and welcome to our post Thanksgiving Gallery Standout Showcase! If you ventured out for Black Friday shopping yesterday, I hope you scored some great deals!  And if you scored some great scrapbook kits, make sure to share them in the gallery and your layout might just get showcased here!

First up we have this super fun recipe layout by Crystal (krystlbear), chosen by Olivia! What a cute idea!  I like how she mixed color and b&w pics and the shadows are so realistic!

Next up is another layout nominated by Olivia and it’s another I’d like to scraplift!  The photo itself is adorable, but the extraction takes it to the next level of awesome!  The sparkle of the repetitive word art is a great touch!

Olivia’s third pick this week is this super cute double pager by Debby (debbysrose)! These photos just make me smile!  The photo-themed kit is wonderful and the layering is great, but the focus remains on those cute little guys!

Jaye gave the shoutout to Sannn’s awesome movie layout with this comment, “wow! Love the depth of your page and the angle of the photo of them in the theatre. Wonderful mix of prints and elements.”  I love the title work and movie title on the ticket!

We’re on a roll with fun layouts this week!  Tropt chose this masterpiece by Natascha with these words, “I love your composition because you really used that chevron paper to highlight your clusters and photos. And your clusters? Sublime! Def going into Faves for a future scraplift.”  So I’m not the only one thinking of lifting it!

Lastly we have a fabulous mix of layers and patterns by Tammy (tammybean). To quote Amber, “Wow – this is awesome! Love all the layers, the colors, your shadows .. it’s all perfect!”

Thanks for visiting today!  I hope you’ve been inspired by these beautiful layouts!  You can click on any layout to be taken to the gallery to find credits or to leave love. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got some leftovers that are calling my name! 

~Dolores

 

Maybe it’s because it is Thanksgiving in the USA, but this one totally caught my eye because of the family theme. Those large floral stitches just add to the dimension and the clustering is really nicely done! Congrats to ChristyHC for this beautiful page!

To leave her some love, you can click the image. =)

She used Family Gathering by Juno Designs.  Find it HERE.

 

 

Correcting Pet Eyes

By Michelle Bradshaw

The world of photography is amazing. Digital photography just blows me away as with a few clicks of the mouse [and a program] one can transform and/or adjust many flaws from the original photo.

Have you ever taken a photo of your beloved pet and their eyes look like this???

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Even if you tried to use the ‘red eye’ tool in Photoshop or Photoshop Elements [which works…on occasion with people], have you noticed it doesn’t work on pet eye? I’m choosing not to get into the photography reasons of why, however hoping this tutorial will assist you in correcting those photos.

Let’s start first with duplicating the original photo. [Although there are always many ways to achieve results with Adobe, one thing remains constant—do not work on your original photo.]

1: Select the eye using magic wand, lasso, or elliptical marquee tool (your preference)

2: Hold shift key and click on the other eye. Select again.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

3: In the options bar (top) set tolerance to about 20 and make sure the anti-alias + contiguous boxes are checked.

4: Menu>select>grow

5: Menu>select >modify> expand, at about 2… and click – ok.

6: Menu> select > feather by less than above..in this example I chose -1.

 

7: Once here… ctrl [cmd on mac] J….then from the menu>enhance>adjust color> and hue/saturation.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

8: Move the saturation all the way to the left. The eyeball will look sorta white [don't panic]. And click ok.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

9: Menu>Enhance> adjust lighting>Levels

Then move the slider from the black side (L) part way toward the right

Until it looks good to you

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

When all is said and done…go to Layer [menu bar] and flatten the image, or just save as with a different file name so as not to destroy original data.

Here is the final result, a before and after.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I hope you enjoyed this tutorial. Please share your results.

Happy Scrapping.

Michelle

 

 

Monday ONLY!! Select items are 50% off!! Visit the ScrapMatters Shop for more details!!
*Sale runs 12am-11:59pm ET. HURRY! What are you waiting for!?! *