Blog Collage, Wine & Fromage

Thank you to my aunt Kathy for the link to Tagxedo, where you can take words from a website (or any text source, including their own suggestions) and use them to create an image of your choice, either from a file you upload or from their library of shapes. The words are sized by frequency, so the more often it appears in your text, the larger it will appear in the shape. Hmmm, do you think I maybe write about my son a lot?



I really like the results, and there are so many options that you could play around with this forever. Kind of a neat idea to use for perhaps designing the mat surrounding a photo in order to give as a gift (as in, give a picture of a child with words describing the child framing their face on the mat), or even for making fun, personalized placemats for a dinner party, and so on. I could get all sorts of creative ideas from this site; now, putting those ideas into action is a whole other story-- one that requires serious amounts of wine and cheese to even begin contemplating.

Photo Fix: Melanie 2009

Another photo repair I worked on was much, much easier than the photo of my dad from 1949. In the old photo, there were fold-marks and wrinkles across the entire page, and taking those out without losing detail or ruining the image underneath was time-consuming and required lots of precision. The photo below, on the other hand, needed some fine-tuning with color balance, hue and saturation, and a few minor cosmetic repairs (i.e., removing stray hairs across the face, improving the lips because all of the reddish color disappeared when the overall yellow tint was removed, fix the strange "bruised" looking shadows on the cheekbones, and so on). I'm really not sure what Joel's camera did that made it yellow; wrong flash setting, maybe?

Original:


Fix:


It obviously looks a lot better after the fix; and yes, it's true, my skin really is that pale during winter. Once the sun starts shining more, I get covered with freckles and can pretend I'm tan. Yay, summer!

Photo Fix: Dad 1949

Just got inspired by some photo repairs my Aunt Kathy has been working on recently in her photoshop classes... so I'm doing some of my own! Here's one of my dad's childhood photographs that I attempted to clean up and repair.

Original photo; highly weathered, faded, wrinkled, and stained--


I tried to keep his freckles distinct and retain as much detail as possible--


I used the second photo along with about 150 others for a DVD slideshow I made a couple of years ago, celebrating my parents' 35th anniversary. It was pretty awesome; I've got to figure out how to post a link so that others can watch it too. It's the type of thing I'd love to do for a living, if I could only figure out how to make sure people actually pay for the services. This isn't Walgreens or Costco, people, it's an individually crafted work of art! (So say all the independent small business owners out there, right? Oy!)