Well, most of you seem to think I'm adding a fifth hooligan to the bunch. Alas, that's not my announcement. Lets keep guessing though, just for fun. Here's a couple clues:
1) It is scrapbook related
2) It has something to do with yesterday's post
Any new guesses?
Thanks to those of you that left great comments yesterday - I'm glad to know the journaling tip was useful for you. Writing exercises (like the one in yesterday's post) are one of the best ways to get out of a journaling rut.
So we're on to photos today. I have two super-duper tips for today, both dealing with photos. The first is my very favorite photo tip (which also happens to be my very favorite journaling tip): your pictures and your journaling DO NOT HAVE TO MATCH. The pictures don’t have to be taken on the day the story happened. The journaling doesn’t have to be about what’s actually taking place in the photos. The story and the pictures should probably be of the same person and have the same general feel (happy words like happy faces and so forth), but that’s it! They don’t even have to from the same time period. Honest. It works. Take a look at today’s example layouts for proof.
The pictures in this layout show Jack and James blowing bubbles together, but the journaling talks about other sorts of things they do together. It's not an exact photo/journaling match, and it doesn't matter. The people match, and the feel of the photos and journaling match, so that's good enough.
For this next layout, I had a great picture of Carter I wanted to use, but not much to say about it, except that he's cute, and that's already apparent in the picture :) So instead I wrote about his developing personality.
Neither of these layouts tells the story of what was happening when the pictures were taken, but they still work. My story for this week's layout is about my youngest coloring all over the walls while I finished watching LOST (and any episode featuring Sawyer is definitely worth finishing - who's tuning in tonight with me? Let's find out what's up with Richard, aka Guyliner!) But, back to the point, I didn't take any pictures of the colored wall. So I'm going to use pictures like this one, of said youngest boy watering my plants. And no one will care that my journaling and pictures don't match and didn't happen on the same day.
Your instructions for today are to rustle up some pictures that happen to feature the same person who stars in your story from yesterday. Or grab your camera and take a few. For this week’s layout you will need exactly one, two, three, four, or more photos, so make sure you get that many, and get those puppies printed and all ready for tomorrow. The only requirement is that all the photos should be vertical, and all the same size, either 4x6 or smaller (if you want to use more than four photos for an 8.5x11 spread or six for a 12x12 spread, I recommend printing wallets).
Like I mentioned, I have one more super-duper photo tip for you:
Most photographs can be quickly improved with a bit of brightening and contrast boosting. It’s extremely easy and can make a big difference in how your photo looks once printed out.
You need some sort of photo processing program that allows you to make changes on your photo’s histogram. That’s this funny picture:
Photoshop Elements lets you access this using the levels command (control L). iPhoto (which you have if you’re lucky enough to own a Mac) lets you access it using the edit>adjustments buttons. Other editing programs will let you do it as well - you'll just have to figure out how to get to your histogram.
The histogram shows you what looks like a mountain range. The left side of the mountains represents the dark in your photo (shadows) and the right side represents the light (highlights). A picture that’s well exposed that has a good variety of light it in will have a histogram that shows the "mountains" extending all the way from the left to the right, like the example up above.
However, often your histogram may show the "mountains" all bunched up in the middle, or bunched up near the left side, like this:
The picture above is underexposed: highlights and midtones aren’t very bright, so there's not a lot of contrast between the light areas and dark areas of the photo. This makes the picture look kind of blah, and when you print it out, it will look even darker than what you see on your screen, since monitors are generally fairly bright.
To fix a picture like this one, grab the rightmost slider, which is for highlights, and pull it toward the left, until it hits the slope of the mountain (red arrow in the example). This will brighten your highlights. Grab the middle slider (for midtones) and pull it to the left as well, until skin tones look bright and beautiful (blue arrow). Then grab the leftmost slider and pull it back to the right until it hits the mountain on this side (yellow arrow). This will darken the shadows.
Each picture is different, so you may want to play with the sliders a little to get the best look. In the above picture, I brought the shadows slider in a little past where the mountains to begin to give more definition to the shadows. You can experiment a bit and still spend less than 90 seconds on this step. Here’s the before and after:
The "after" picture will print much brighter and end up looking a lot better than the "before." Take a minute to improve the photos you want to use, and get them printed out. Come back tomorrow and we’ll start getting this layout together!
