Goodbye, 2011. Hello, 2012!

With this year pretty much wrapped up, I am not only looking forward to continued the partnership with our clients where I get to help them succeed, but also thankful for the very very full year where I have done just that: helped people succeed. I will be posting more in the coming months about this process that I enjoy, and it has been a great year. There were the usual projects, the logos, illustrations, posters, newsletters, email blasts, vehicle graphics and so on, but there were some new ones as well. There was the 240 page book now being sold everywhere, several business proposals that help land 150 miles of rail line in Oregon as well as a spot in a huge retail chain that I can say nothing more except that it is one a story of a small business hitting the big time in a big way. How can that not be exciting? There were other books as well, paired with music cds [there were lots of those] and a lot more cycling jerseys and race clothing. Add into all of this a personal project of adding onto my home where I was able to spend time on deciding how the space was to be used which included a 3 foot by 12 foot walk-in shower. Maybe better than that was laying 1800 sq ft of slate tile. It may seem crazy, but I sorted, piled, and chose where each uniquely colored stone was going to rest for the next 30+ years. I don’t often get to sculpt or build things, so this was a bit of a treat. A long, tiring, knee-busting treat. Nearly every surface of the interior has been painted a different color, but that may be what I do best: color. The early morning sun lights the main room on fire, calling the family to curl up on the couches and enjoy. After a whole year of a lot of destruction, there was plenty of construction for the family to enjoy.

Yes, it has been a good year for getting a lot of work done. I wouldn’t have it any other way. Thank you for letting me create for you – 2012 should be even better.

Quick Wedding Photo Editing

My friend Travis over at Travis Williams Photography [nice logo, btw] recently contacted me about a wedding he had just shot. The bride and groom had a 15″ height difference, which seemed normal to me as my wife and I have a 14″ difference. The problem was that in shuffling the family around for their wedding photos, he had the bride and the groom on the top step which would be completely normal except the height difference with the rest of the family came out looking unbalanced. Could I fix it? Sure, that would be easy. I wasn’t going to have to do anything difficult in Photoshop other than make a hole where the groom once existed and slide a copy of groom down a bit and clean it up a bit. You could do the same thing with a photograph in the magazine, but this was a wedding photo. No do-overs on taking these photos.

Here is the couple by themselves, which will be normal because that is their normal difference in height.

wedding photo edited in Photoshop

And then as a family. Just by looking at the lengths of their arms, I wouldn’t think anyone is over 5’7″, and being a step down doesn’t help. Sort of makes the groom look like an NBA center.

wedding photo edited in Photoshop

With a few minutes of editing, I masked out the image, removing the groom and leaving the family.

wedding photo edited in Photoshop

I dropped the groom down a bit on and cleaned up the area where he used to be and it worked out fine.

wedding photo edited in Photoshop

Even though the mother’s shadow had dropped down a bit, it still looked believable as there aren’t any other shadows to make hers look poorly offset. To fix the shadow, that would have taken a lot more work, and it wouldn’t have been noticeable unless there was a smart CSI checking out the photo. The groom does look a little out of place – his body proportions don’t match up, making his torso seem short and his legs too long. Time to crop the photo to remove the legs on everyone.

wedding photo edited in Photoshop

And with that, there is now a great wedding photo made better with a little image editing in Photoshop. I’ll post some difficult photo editing projects another time.