Did you know that Casper, Wyoming is the breaking off point for all the pioneer trails?  Honestly, I didn’t either until I went there last week.  Christi and I went to the Pioneer Trails Interpretive Center in Casper and then on the way home we stopped at Independence Rock and Martin’s Cove.  I loved it!

Here are some storyboards I made in photoshop.  I’m actually kinda impressed with myself.  I might do a post later about how to do this.

PS – I didn’t get the teaching job in Casper.  I’m okay with it (see previous post).  But the principal told me of another job in the district and also said that they may have another opening at my school and wanted to know if I wanted to be considered for it.  He also said several times that they were impressed with me.  That is always nice to hear.

As promised . . . Here are some of the other actions in PSE that I got for free from CoffeeShop. Did I mention they are free? And completely beautiful. And amazing. And easy. And are slowly making me really like photoshop because someone else has done all the hard work for me.

Here is the original.

This action is called “Butterscotch Vintage.” Sigh.

This is just “Rounded Corners.” I never thought that a rounded corners could really change a photo as much as this, but now I want to make all my photo’s with rounded corners.

This action is called “Memories of Sunshine.” Doesn’t it make you feel all warm and fuzzy and can you feel the rays of sun?

This is called “Selective Color.” Now, you actually brush in the color black over the color you want to keep. I don’t get it. But, oh well. It looks nice. And it was easy.

And here is the “Burn” from yesterday.

I’ve decided that I needed to learn Photoshop.  As much as I LOVE LOVE LOVE Aperture 3 and I still plan on using it, almost all professional photographers use Photoshop.  So, I opened up my Photoshop Elements and googled some how to’s and started experimentin’.

Now, if you looked at my favorite blog list, one of the blogs I listed is CoffeeShop Photography.  Rita, who writes the blog, proved a ton of free actions for Photoshop and Photoshop Elements. I’ve started downloading her stuff and watching/reading her tutorials.  If you use PSE or PS, you really should go to her site and download some beautiful actions.

One of the first things I downloaded was her action for creating a vignette using a Burn action.  I thought I would try it out.

Here is a photo I took of my cousin Amber at her wedding.  (By the way, this was taken like 4 years ago.)

Then I applied the first vignette layer.

I didn’t think it was enough.  But in Aperture, you just strengthen the vignette.  I couldn’t figure out how to do that in PSE.  So, I just added the action again and it created a new layer.  Once, I actually looked it up, you don’t normally do it this way, but it worked.  Go to Rita’s tutorial to see how you are supposed to do it.

Ooooh!  It worked!  I did a third layer.

Then a fourth!

I got a little carried away with the fourth layer.  So I chose to go with the third layer of vignette.

Here is the final version.

I was so happy with how easy it really was.  So I downloaded some more actions.  I’ll show you the results tomorrow!