« Back to (Im)Perfect (April 2011)
Breathe | Autumn Baldwin
A Note from Autumn
A photo doesn’t have to be perfect in order to end up on a scrapbook page, but there are certainly things we can do to improve our not-so-great photos before we use them on a layout. For this layout I started with four pictures from my baby girl’s hospital stay during a bout with RSV. I didn’t have many pictures to choose from, so these were the best I had. I did a couple of things to make the pictures even better: 1) I threw out the worst picture, the one that’s just a jumble of equipment. It’s overexposed, and too confused to help tell me story. 2) I cropped way in on the picture of the monitors, leaving only the essential and getting rid of all the distractions. 3) I changed two photos to a tinted B&W* that would better match my layout. 4) I substituted a picture I took of Lily after we got home from the hospital for the one I had of her in the hospital. The at-home picture is so much better, and no one will ever know (or care) that it wasn’t taken during her hospital stay.
*To make a tinted b&w in Photoshop Elements 6.0: Open your photo in Elements. Click on the foreground color box and choose a dark color (I used a very dark turquoise). Be sure the background color is set to white. In the layers palette, click on the half white/half black circle to add an adjustment layer, then choose gradient map. In the dropdown menu choose your first option, foreground to background. Click ok.