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This blog is now exclusively devoted to crafting in general, and the shop in particular! Pretty much all of my personal content has been moved to a new blog, one that is intended primarily to help keep our family and friends in the loop. (If you are interested in following the new blog, you will find it here.) This blog will continue to feature shop news, new listings, sales, giveaways, and all of my share-worthy crafting exploits.

Friday, January 30, 2009

Poodle Scarf and Picture Woes

While I was at the shop yesterday, I picked up some new yarn to play around with. I got 3 skeins of Patons® Pooch Yarn in "Indian Summer", thinking that it would crochet into a really cute chunky scarf. And it did. :) I did the same lattice stitch that I almost always use, and it worked out well because this yarn is really bulky. It was kind of a pain to work with, in the same way that bouclĂ© is pain to work with. On the plus side, though, it went really fast. I had the whole scarf (all 3 skein's worth) done in about an hour and a half.

As you can see, the scarf is cute but the picture is not. I spent an hour this morning trying to get a decent picture... Different rooms (with different lighting), different angles... Of course it didn't help that I was doing all the picture taking myself. So, I have decided that I need to join the PhotoShop bandwagon... It's just too cool a program not to have, especially since I am going to be taking a lot of baby photos in the near future... So, to that end, what suggestions do all of you photoshop savvy people have? Which version should I get? How difficult is it to use? Could I possibly bribe one of you to teach me how to use it, once I get my hands on the program? Really, I'll bribe you. :)

6 comments:

kms handmade said...

Get a free trial version of Photoshop CS and see if you want to mess with it. It's very very expensive. You can get Elements for under $100 but it doesn't run all the actions. You need to just take a class. Really. I know you wish we could just show you, but I think we've all taken classes. It's worth it. I for sure don't know enough about it to teach photo editing. But if you want to learn digi scrapbooking, let me know.

Jennifer said...

do the trial version 1st like Kelly said. If you need help just getting started till you can take a class, I can help some..I barely know anything.I can at least show you how to open photos and basic (very basic editing) mostly turning a pic to b/w or brighting them, etc. Regarding the pictures though, you need to put your camera on a tripod and use a timer. That's what i did for all my baby bump profile pics and other self portraits:)

Adrienne said...

Yeah, there's just no way that we can afford the CS4 version. It'll have to be the Elements. I checked out the Adobe website, and found the "download free trial" button, but then it occurred to me that my husband is going to have my laptop with him in Virginia for the next month. (He leaves in the morning.) So, I'm going to wait and download it as soon as he gets back. It kind of sucks, I was looking forward to playing with it. Maybe I can start messing around with it at the shop??

Kara Forristall said...

Make sure your laptop has at least 2 GB or ram so you can adequately run the program, I can help you out, I know CS3 pretty well, well enough to teach the class, but what will really improve images, is shooting in RAW, if your camera has that capability, then you have more options to play with, but JPEG images will do well too! Let me know I can give you a lesson or two =)

Corinnea said...

Your scarf is really cute!
It is hard taking pics of yourself. One of the last I took was in my water closet..... That probably sounds weirder than it is.

Rachel said...

Beautiful scarf and thanks for all the pictures! I can't comment on them unless Neal is home. I used his gmail account to sign up for this thing and I can never remember the password and the damn computer won't remember it no matter how many times I tell it to!!! So unless he's home, I can't comment. I just wanted to let you know that I do appreciate all the pics though :-) How are you feeling?