Archive for October 2011
The Top 10 Funniest Holiday Photo Card Ideas Revealed
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!
Photo Editing – The Wonders of Photo Manipulation
Photo editing is not what it used to be. With the presence of image editing software and tutorials on how they could be used, more and more people are dabbling into correcting the photos they took themselves, instead of going to specialists. The advent of the Internet and computers, the darkroom has already become something of the past.
There are still photographers who prefer to practice this almost dying photography method though because they like the idea of working with their hands and using inks and dyes to get the effect that they want, especially when it comes to photo manipulation. However, they are just a chosen few, and most of the people dabbling in photography now are taking advantage of the photo editing capabilities that technology is offering.
What Could Be Done in Image Editing
There are a great number of things that could be done to correct flaws in photos, whether they are portraits or non-portraits. While there are basic adjustments that could be made like red eye removal, correcting color balance or contrast and brightness, and applying some simple special effects like black and white, sepia, there are more advanced photo editing corrections that could do more to the appearance of photos. These include getting rid of excess weight or flab, lessening the appearance of eye bags, whitening the teeth, and getting rid of blemishes on the skin, among many others.
Aside from these, there are also other more advanced editing techniques being used in photo editing, and these include photo manipulation and background removal. Photo manipulation is one of the oldest retouching techniques in the world of photography and deals with a combination of graphic design and photography. Because of this, most of the photos that have gone through this method of photo editing give an appearance of illusion that could mostly be found in photo art. Image warping is one of the easiest photo manipulation techniques used in photo manipulation.
Background removal is also another image editing technique that is commonly used by both professionals and beginners in the world of photography. Aside from this, there are also many now who are venturing into making their own photo collages digitally. While a lot of people may been used to manual kind where gluing is done to post the pictures on a cardboard or paper, more and more now prefer the digital way of gluing photos on their PCs and then adding some effects like mosaics and the picture grid.
What Are Used in Photo Editing Projects
There is a wealth of image editing software available now that could be used so that all these corrections and adjustments could be done. There are others though that are more commonly used than others, and these include Adobe Photoshop and Picasa. If you are planning to use either of the software, you have to be aware Picasa is only good for basic adjustments and bit of advanced photo editing. It is the Adobe Photoshop that could offer you a great number of tools that will enable you to do so much more when it comes to retouching your portraits and non-portraits exceptionally. If you are concerned about whether you would know how to use such tools like the pen, the magnetic lasso and the channel mask, among others, then you should look up some step-by-step tutorials on how they could be used.
Photo Editing
Photography is something enjoyed by all, regardless of social status or geographical barriers it encompasses the viewer as well as the photographer. Each picture telling a story, from landscapes to portraits, candid and posed, photography is an art that can be appreciated by all. There is a large variety of photography types, from print to digital, there is something for everyone. Most everyone has a camera these days, snapping pictures for social networking, too awe inspiring scenes that captivate and immerse us into their grandeur.
There are many clubs, organizations, and networks you can get into to advance yourself into the hobby or career of photography. The best resource to start with is right here on the Internet, where you are most likely reading this article. The fascination with photography usually starts young, and when you think about it… it surrounds you. From magazines, to even TV, the Internet, to shopping at the grocery store, we are bombarded with images all the time. This can be both good and bad, the image is just telling the story that the photographer captured, the mood of the moment and the action that is taking place.
There are those photographs that need nothing more than an audience to share in the splendor that the photographer has captured, and then there are those which could use the details to be enhanced or possibly an effect to bring out that hidden potential locked inside. Editing digitial photo-images has become a corner stone to enhancing photography that we see from the Internet. With just a computer, and software you can take the ordinary to the extraordinary, and share it with friends, family and peers alike. Using color corrections, gamma, contrast controls is just the beginning. The sophistication of the software world today now allows you to make a panorama, slide shows to be burned to DVD, Blu-ray or shared instantly on your favorite portals.
Digital Photography has taken the Internet by storm, with a plethora of sites dedicated to the storage and sharing of these memorable images. Personalizing, and perfecting these photographs has also seen a mass production of software tools, from adding text, too design elements. There are a variety of edits and effects to take that simple picture into a show stopping photograph. Now, you can create a personalized touch for gifts and greetings, simple and easy… Digital photography is an evolution in multimedia.
Photo Editing is something everyone can do, all you need is the eye for the image and inspiration to perfect it.