Manipulation

Since the kids have chosen to have mercy upon me these past two days and napped for three hours straight at the same time (!), I took the opportunity to get some things done. I didn't work on any of my household organization projects that have been cluttering up my To Do List for the past months. No, that would be silly. Instead I downloaded GIMP. You know, Poor Man's Photoshop.

I still have absolutely no eye for editing photographs. I can't adjust the color to take out the yellow tint of those taken indoors without a flash. I can't edit my photos to make it look like my children are sitting on top of a cheetah while it eats a antelope. I can't ... well, there's a whole list of things I can't do. I can mess around with things and try out some things and alter some pictures.

One of the things I've seen popping up in photos is the black and white with a bit of color. It's not a favorite look for some people. I'm pretty undecided about it. But it seemed like an easy effect to accomplish. And it is. It's time consuming, but not too difficult. Of course, I should add that I don't know how to do all the detail work that would make the edited photo look professional, but figuring out how to select an item and remove the color from everything but that item was not complicated. The hardest part for me was picking out the photo to edit. And then deciding what to highlight. Eventually, I quit worrying about trying to make a photo that looked good and just decided to practice.

And some were really bad ...

And some were a little creepy ...

And some maybe highlighted an odd piece of the photo ...

And some might make you wonder about my kids ...

And some had color that was harder to spot than others ...

And some I thought were cute ...

And some didn't turn out quite as I had pictured ...

And some I just played with ...




But I taught myself something new and enjoyed nap time :) Which means it was time well spent in my book! Plus, David's going to try to teach me the finer points of the software to help me mess with our photos even more!