Totally Rad

I love the whole process of photography. From the click of the shutter to putting the finishing touches on an image. I'm digital and happily so.

Does that mean I can't use a darkroom? Somewhat I suppose. My darkroom is in my computer. It is called Photoshop and that is where I can turn a ho-hum image into something that will knock your socks off.

Like anything else, Photoshop has tools. One of my most favorite tools in Photoshop is actions. Actions allow me to take rather blah, hazy image like this:

SOOC That's photog talk for "straight out of the camera"


To this with one click of the mouse...subtle changes, a punch of color, sharpened a bit. It's just what many images need. A little boost with "Boutwell's Magic Glasses":

With one action Totally Rad Action Boutwell's Magic Glasses


Or, if I'm feeling particularly artsy, I may go even further with one more action:

Let's hear it for artsy Totally Rad Action Troy


I know by know you are scratching your head and wondering what this "Totally Rad" stuff is. Well, it is a magical place that has magical actions for photographs. That's where I got the actions I used to edit these photos.



Now I want to make dirty pictures. And Totally Rad will help. No. Not those kind of dirty pictures. Shame on you. These 'dirty' pictures have beautiful textures layered over them so they take on a whole new quality. The twist here is they have automated it somewhat. Adding textures to images is a messy business in my opinion. But with their little dirty picture program for Photoshop, it cleans it right up. Oxymoron...no?

Guess I'll be saving my pennies.

Jacksonville Beach

Nikki is here for a visit, so we went out for brunch today. The place we picked was a little beach cafe that serves a great 'greasy spoon' type breakfast. But in the process, we started to talk about Beachside, another cafe nearby. They have awesome fish. The fish won out.

Before dining, we took a side trip to the beach to check out the red tide situation. It seems that it was subsided in that area. I took a few pictures (of course) and played with a new program I have, Photoshop. Here are the results of both.

Mast


The stand


Beach


Seaoats


Beach again

Is it too much? Or just right? Please say just right. It was a PIMA to figure out. And I had to work in Picasa2 for final touches because when I uploaded the Photoshop images to Blogger, as beautiful as they looked on my computer, became dark. I need to figure out why. It should just be done in Photoshop. Don't ya think?