The Top 10 Funniest Holiday Photo Card Ideas Revealed

January 4th, 2012 Posted in photo funny
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The holidays can represent a wide range of beliefs, traditions, and gift-giving opportunities. While the holidays are traditionally a time of religious and spiritual contemplation and rejoicing, everyone can use some humor in their life. This is especially true in today’s tight economy where many families are discovering that they will be unable to travel to see family and friends this holiday season. This realization is making the use of Christmas cards and holiday photo cards, once again, a great way to reconnect with loved ones without breaking the family bank account.

Everyone needs a good laugh now and then. You can use your Christmas cards as a way to spread some holiday cheer by using humorous family photographs to design custom made holiday cards. Nearly everyone has a photograph or two that can bring on a smile even on the worst of days. If you do not have one that will work, there are plenty of opportunities to create a humorous holiday photo card with a digital camera and very little effort.

1. Bathtub Bubbles – Bubble bath photos nearly always bring a smile, especially when the tub is also filled with pets and/or children dressed in Santa hats or reindeer antlers. The bubbles end up being props of their own and the delighted faces of your children will shine through on these holiday photo cards.

2. Crazy Crashes – We don’t actually want to see anyone get hurt, but sometimes the camera is right where it needs to be to catch a moment that says it all. Feet in the air, skyrocketing eyebrows, and mouths in a perfect “O” can bring make us laugh out loud in spite of ourselves.

3. Doing It Old School – Grab the family and get decked out in something hysterically historical. Add a sepia-time filter and you have everything you need for some comical Christmas cards.

4. Dressing Up – Most children love the chance to dress up in Mommy and Daddy’s clothes. Grab an armful of shoes, jackets, dresses, and hats and let the fun begin. Your kids will parade and prance for as long as your camera batteries will last, creating funny family photographs perfect for your holiday photo cards.

5. Driveway Deliberations – Take a broom to the driveway and break out a big box of brightly colored chalk and urge family members to add their holiday message to the driveway. Once all of your “artists” have completed their works, have a neighbor snap a shot of the family declaring their holiday driveway message.

6. Exquisitely Embarrassing – Everyone has photographs that make the subject cringe and groan out loud as family and friends laugh riotously and tease affectionately. These humorous Christmas photo cards are sure to be a favorite, as everyone else recalls embarrassing moments of their own.

7. Food Foibles – Whether the photograph is of a toddler wearing their birthday cake or a bowlful of spaghetti, kids involuntarily feeding the family dog, or the new wife’s smoke-filled kitchen, these photographs are sure to provide the comic relief everyone needs this holiday season.

8. Hysterical Holidays – Thanksgiving turkeys that ended up on the floor, silly Halloween costumes, family vacation adventures, birthday party disasters, and cake-mashing wedding photographs can all be used to generate humor as well as let others know what your family has been up to during the year.

9. Intriguing Insights – Candid photographs often show far more than was intended. Children stuck in buckets, dogs sneaking up on unsuspecting diners, and the kids’ attempt at bathing the family dog can all provide plenty of good choices for your holiday photo cards.

10. Pampered Pets – Pets make great subjects for humorous Christmas cards. Most dogs and even some cats will tolerate being dressed, decorated, and posed in countless humorous photo card options. Santa hats, antlers, and human clothing can all be used to create something silly that everyone will enjoy.

We should always be looking for ways of thinking outside the box. There may be a humorous photo waiting to happen, and through more creative or non-conventional situations, you may easily capture that next holiday Christmas memory. This is also a simple, easy way to have a whole lot of fun!

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Photoshop – 5 Recommended Brushes

January 4th, 2012 Posted in photoshop
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Brushes are a key method of applying effects to an object in Adobe Photoshop. They may be used to add colour, remove colour, replace elements of an image with other areas or simply painting onto sections of an image. Brushes are an import ingredient in your Photoshop life. To master this section the user must first learn the basic brush tool, the others will then become easier to learn as they all adopt the same principle.

1- Brush tool
The basic brush is one of the simplest to use but still the most important. Once the user has mastered this brush the remaining becomes much easier to learn. The user can paint onto an object controlling the opacity, flow and mode of the brush depending on the effect which is required. Photoshop prevents the user from painting onto a type layer. In-order to paint onto a text layer the layer must first be rasterized.

The original brush tool can also be used for masking information. Painting with a black brush will hide image information, painting with a white brush will reveal image information. The process is preferable to the eraser tool. Editing is non destructive, allowing information to be re-edited or deleted if not required.

2- Clone Tool
Used to replace elements of an image with other section from the original image or another. The user will define a source point by using the Alt key. They will paint over the desired area to remove unwanted elements. For best practice clone onto a new blank layer. Ensure sample all layers has been selected in the options bar. To avoid a patchy effect apply the effect in a dabbing motion.

3- Eraser Tool
The most destructive brush tool. Used to permanently remove information from the image. The information can also be gradually removed by reducing the opacity of the brush in the brush options palette.

4- History Brush Tool
Used to paint pre-defined history states onto an image. For example apply levels to an image, record the effect using the ‘create snap shot’ tool. Repeat the process for all other applied colour effects such as hue saturation or levels. To apply the effect select the source for the history brush and paint the effect onto the image were required.

5 – Colour Effect Brush Tools
Includes blur and sharpen tools. The effect is applied using the same principle as the basic brush. Blur tool is used to blur pixel edges ideal for areas of high aliasing. The sharpen tool will sharpen pixel edges.

Used to create basic to complex effects. While using the brush tool the user tends to alter less frequently the hardness of the brush edge. What we do tend to alter is the brush diameter. This can be quickly edited by using the left bracket key to reduce, and the right bracket key to increase size. This principle can be applied regardless of the brush tool being used.

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What Is Photoshop?

January 4th, 2012 Posted in photoshop
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Adobe Photoshop is a very cool program, enabling you to do lots of awesome stuff. More specifically, it is a layered graphic editing program. Which means that if you learn how to exploit all its functions, you can create, edit and manipulate any image you want.

It might sound confusing at first, but once you spend some time with it, you’ll grasp everything in no time. First of all, layers. Every new piece of data that you add to an image is called a layer. You still see the whole image as one, but with every new piece of data added a new layer is also added. However, this doesn’t mean that you have the entire image selected and active. If you’re trying to apply something to the whole image, but you see only one portion affected, then you’re in the wrong layer.

As mentioned above, a new layer is added with each action you take. For example, if you use the text tool, by adding text to your image you will create a new layer. However, if you return to that text, edit it, change colors or whatever, you won’t create a new layer, you will still be working in the same layer. But don’t worry, you don’t have to memorize all layers in order to change something. Just press F7 to bring up all layers in the lower side of the screen.

Photoshop is an incredibly useful tool, a real powerful ally to every photographer, whether amateur or professional. It has tons of cool tools and features, and you can do just about anything you can think of to your images. If you learn how to use it, that is.

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