Alison Michelle photo retouch

One of my hobbies is restoring and retouching/enhancing photos and portraits. Now combine that with the fact my beautiful bride to be is 5000 miles away I tend to work a lot on pictures of her! :) I guess in some sense its a touch from far away, well it is for me, each one of the photos is a memory of some event shared between between us, or from some event we attend in our respective countries, but still share them to let the other feel they are joining in the day to day activities. I find myself many nights sitting in front of the pc and looking through all the many we have and often times open up my Paint Shop program and just play around a bit seeing the different effects and moods I can create. And also in some way only those in a long distance relationship can understand, to touch the woman I love! :)

Well tonight I found one that just seemed to be calling to me to open up and do just that. This particular one is cropped from a larger photo, ad i replaced the background and then just gave it a few fixes here and there, these photo filter plugins can really give a normal digital photo a professional look too it. Well I’m not trying to brag, just saying even a regular pic without any other work on can be much improved just applying one of these filters using the default settings. I do ten though to do a few more things first, such as removing a busy background and adding one to focus the attention on the subject, not that my attention is ever long from Alison! ;)

Oh I may get myself in trouble now as I cant remember off hand now what the date was this picture was taken, I want to say late September or early October of last year. It was a wedding she was going to attend and she took a few pics before she went.

Here’s the original… Well not that she doesnt have a lovely home, I just thought the plant and the part of the kitchen showing was taking away from over all look of the photo, and I was just wanting all my attention on her :) Well I hope she’s not minding me using the picture, at least its photographic proof of a sort that I was thinking of her tonight! ( Hi baby, I Love you! XXX) 

Well its not really hard to do these if you have had a bit of practice. most of the work is done using layers in the program, well like stacking parts of photos over top of another if you will, except the areas fo some are transparent and what lies underneath shows through those parts. So basically all I did in this one was to add a layer beneath this original and fill it with colour using two shades, the darker around the edges and the lighter bit behind here, just a sort of emphasis and a basic photo backdrop. then I went to the original layer and just erased everything but her. The most time of course is doing the fine lines close to her, which is where I get to have the feeling I am touching her in a sense, so that part takes time and to be honest i am taking my time doing it, I love to lala! ;)  lol well once all the bits not her are removed I simply merge the layers and then go about sorting the colour levels and lighting and deciding what kind of effect i want. In the case of this one it, I basically left it as it was and just maybe added a bit of warmth to it and a just a very slight blur to give it that bit fo a dreamy feeling is what I call it. :)  Anyway just thought I would share with the world what I ahve been up to this evening and now I better go and write my love’s morning mail or she will soon be up and wondering where I am!! Well I think she knows by now I sometimes get sidetracked either with pictures or on YouTube. :) 

Meanderings Alison, Photos, plugins, retouch, Tech