My latest and greatest

You all know that lately Becca has come over and taken pictures of various people in my house and worked absolute magic with her computer to make the pictures actually good. (I am currently waiting for the last set involving the famous Mary Kate but I'm sure they'll be fabulous...) I guess she has been using the program Adobe Photoshop CS3 to work these miracles. Well, Friday DJ came over to my house with a bunch of cds from her personal collection and loaded all kinds of programs onto my computer that she assured me would be the coolest programs I'd ever seen. She then proceeded to come back over on Saturday and in no less than 5 minutes had created multiple banners that flashed and spun around and faded in and out and whatnot, thoroughly impressing both me and Amy, who was also here, however she did not explain to us how she did any of it. So now I have all these glorious programs and no idea what to do with any of them.

Last night I decided to try out one of the programs called Corel Paint Shop Pro X. I only learned to do two things but let me tell you it is AWESOME! Pretty soon I am going to be able to do lots of really cool stuff with this program, I just know it. The first thing I learned how to do is resize photos. You may think this is no big deal, but Picasa doesn't do this (or if it does I have yet to figure out how) and all my pictures are so huge when I download them from my camera that they must be resized. The second thing I learned to do was even out skin tones. This tool is no doubt the single explanation for why my wedding pictures turned out so marvelous. I made an example so you could see what I'm talking about.

This is a picture of my mother holding Skylar that my dad took when they were here a couple of weeks ago. Skylar had a heat rash on her cheeks. FYI-there is nothing wrong with the rest of her face--that's her normal, everyday expression.
This is the picture after I used the retouching tool and evened out her skin tone and wiped off the heat rash. I am so proud of myself I might actually break my arm patting my own back for a job well done-and it was my first effort! If I keep working on it there is literally no stopping me from making everyone in my family overly presentable and good looking. And once I learn to use Flash my blog will reach new heights in tackiness, so get ready people!