What a Life!

So enjoying The Joy Diet (as previously discussed)…and as a part of that I’ve rediscovered my love of blogging – both writing and reading blogs. But here’s the real deal: I’m learning Photoshop Elements.

Scary confession here: I’ve tried learning Photoshop before but have been completely and utterly intimidated by that beast. Last year I bought Photoshop Elements but could never get it to run on my computer right. Errrr.

Part of my Joy Diet is taking more pictures. But not knowing how to edit them and make them great had kind of taken the joy out of it. My approach had previously been to take them as best I could with my camera, which is still my approach because it’s better to do it right with the camera than to have to make corrections in post-production. Still, there are limits on that, especially when taking candid pictures.

I got the new version of Photoshop Elements (it works very nicely on my computer, thank you very much). I’m now reading this to learn how to use it. I like this book because it tells you the basics of each command and what it affects and what it doesn’t affect so you can intelligently decide which feature to use.  I’m about half way through, and it’s pretty logical in how it’s laid out. The next chapter up is the one on getting the selection tools to work – wish me luck on that (I’ve never been able to get this program to behave when it comes to making selections).

Last weekend I moved all my photos into the Organizer, then promptly decided that wasn’t going to work. I have over 11,000 photos on my computer. iPhoto organizes the photos automatically by date and then shows one photo from each date so you can scroll through and find things fairly quickly. The Organizer that comes with Elements shows each picture one by one so you have to scroll and scroll and scroll. The current plan is to leave all of my original photos (minus the ones I delete right away) in iPhoto and keep only the edited photos in Organizer. One of the benefits of that will be at the end of the year when I go to make calendars and what not, I can skim through the edited photos which should be the cream of the crop rather than going through everything.

For now, I’ve learned how to crop photos in the Organizer and color correct skin which makes my photos look much better. I know, that’s not much. But actually I’m quite excited about mastering both tasks as I’ve tried multiple times to do such simple things in Elements only to fail and fail again.

The problem, though, with learning all of the things that Photoshop Elements can do is that I now see so many more flaws in my pictures. Woe is me!

But I am taking a lot more pictures now. And that’s what makes my heart happy. Capturing those precious moments. They fly by so quickly.