Fluffoshop
I’ve been going through some of my old digital photos lately, partly to clear more space (40GB was plenty in 2003 but doesn’t go far these days), and partly because it’s beyond ridiculous that I’ve hardly printed a single photo since going digital.
Also, I’m intending to test out a few photobook services and eventually pick one to do a wedding photobook with. It’s one thing to be a chilled non-Bridezilla and it’s another to be more than a year past your wedding and shamefacedly explaining to kind-hearted inquiring relatives that no, we don’t have an album to show them yet, yes, we could have ordered one from our photographer but no, we didn’t because we wanted to control costs and DIY it, and yes, it’s pretty lame when the end result of “controlling wedding album costs” = “no wedding album to speak of because we spent too much time sitting on our asses watching Dexter”.
Anyway! I decided to use old holiday photos to do the test photobooks because I thought I would be less likely to descend into a little pit of perfectionism with those. Of course, then I just happened to discover that ingenious people have found ways to use Curves with Photoshop Elements and install Photoshop actions to do all sorts of neat things which I can’t be bothered to do manually. (None of this is possible with the default setup of my antediluvian Photoshop Elements 2.0, though I’m fully prepared for some of you to gently inform me that this life-changing Photoshop Elements revelation is really the equivalent of celebrating the invention of vacuum cleaners because previously I would have had to suck dust into my mouth and spit it into the bin.)
So I’ve been tinkering away happily and experimenting with stuff beyond the simple Levels – Unsharp Mask – Save For Web workflow I used to stick to. Here’s a little dog I photographed in Chiang Mai but never showed you because my Chiang Mai entries didn’t go beyond day 2. He’s not the most accomplished and sophisticated example of what I now hope to achieve with my radly haxXoRed Elements, but he is the only example I found myself petting with my mouse cursor.
