this is what beautiful looks like when you're four

lily sandwich

lots of times a lily sandwich means derek and i squeeze her in between us but sometimes a lily sandwich is just that

maybe if your kid's name is sargento or merriweather or jimbobjonnyjoejoe you won't want them seeing this picture because that's just too much sandwich for a kid

kid activity for snow days

my best christmas present this year and my best christmas present last year

the a's to some q's

this shirt was a christmas gift from my seesta. find it at signals (and various other places online)


same sister got me these (she's good) next i want orange ones

the lily lego picture (i'll show you again) had the following settings

• took it with a 50mm 1.4 lens.


• opened up the file i have on my faq page (but I'll put it right here for you too)

ALLIEPHOTOEDIT.psd

• selected and dragged (drug?) all the layers (except for the "nothing" layer....that's just a placeholder) onto my lego photo


• didn't change a thing. usually slide the levels sliders around a bit but it looked good and adjusting nothing is quicker than adjusting a little


• merged all layers together so i'm back to just the one


• unsharp mask 1 px 100%. maybe i even did this twice


• rounded the corners of course and all that stuff i did to post it to my blog

it's not snips and snails after all

you should be excited to have a boy, miss z

a word from the boy

let's round some corners

my directions for creating your own photoshop action for getting it done:

i used cs2. it should work the same in other editions. i don't know anything about anything else...sorry if you are trying to make it through life with corel draw or something like that.

the way i have my action set it to use a photograph at full resolution out of my camera (already edited), round the corners and fill in the background space with white, change the resolution and size (since I'm going to post it to my blog...probably not print pictures with rounded corners), save the file in my "blog to do" folder, and close it

change your version however you like.

but if you don't know what you're doing yet, follow these steps exactly to figure it out. if you goof up while recording your action hit stop and go back and trash whatever step you don't like.

start with an opened photo (you see I would just share my action with you but our photo sizes are all going to be a bit off and how round we like the corners as well. i don't like the actions where you have to adjust the size of the rounded rectangle every single time so i figured this way out)

1. create new action (the little turning page button)

2. name it whatever (probably Rounded Corners Portrait or Allie is Cool Landscape) and put it in whatever action set you choose

3. hold alt and double-click the background layer of your photo

4. select the shape tool (your settings at the top should be shape layers, rounded rectangle, and some number of pixels...you might need to figure out how many pixels you want to use ahead of time. i liked the look of 400 px but see how you like it with how big your pictures come out of your camera)

5. draw the rounded rectangle onto your photo

6. right-click on the Shape 1 layer and rasterize layer

7. drag Layer 0 to the top of the pile

8. ctl-alt-g to create a clipping mask

9. click on Layer 1 then hold ctl and click the new layer button

10. hit d then hit x

11. alt-backspace (this fills the new layer with white)

12. right-click on Layer 1 and flatten image

13. ctl-alt-i for image size. i change resolution to 72 since i'll be posting it to the internet and the width to 500 px since that's what fits on my blog

14. ctl-shft-s to save as. then i just find my folder (NOT the ORIGINAL) for "blog to do", click on it and leave the filename the same

15. ctl-w to close

16. stop recording

then i recorded a second action only started with a horizontally situated photo.

be sure to save actions or whatever you gotta do to make sure they don't go away when you close photoshop.

weeding out

hey everyone that's still here. let's pretend like we're the cool ones left after everyone else gave up on me and my promises to post tutorials and all kinds of stuff i never did. ya! highfive!

i never thought i was so comment-driven but all those quick ones that got sent to my inbox made me giggle and want to dig out some more pictures.

also i perfected my corner rounding methods and round corners are this year's navigation tabs, don't you know?

let's make a deal

i'll start blogging again with improved regularity if you don't mention how long it's been or how random my topics will be or complain when i go all the way back to thanksgiving since that's how long it's been since i had anything to do with the pictures on my camera really. deal? deal.


and if i figure out how to run photoshop and blogger again we'll be back in business.