Photoshop fun

John gave me the Photoshop Elements program for Christmas, which was a very thoughtful gift since I use my digital camera almost daily. Elements is a slightly dumbed down version of the full Photoshop, but still has more features than I'll ever need. And so, I was excited yesterday morning to sit down and "learn something new." Anyway, there's this tipping point with mastering new software. If you're like me, you dive right in confidently and just as quickly want to give up. The trick is to soldier on through the fog.

After a couple of hours, I finally started having fun making myself look glamorous in a lousy photograph. A feature called "Create Portrait" walks you right through it. Click, click, click. A little blur gets rid of shiny nose and wrinkles. A touch of eyebrow pencil and lipstick helps. The toothbrush feature gave me teeth like white fiberglass. Oh my goodness! All of a sudden I looked 25 years old again. No wait-- even better than I ever looked at 25. So that's how they do it on magazine covers. And the final best click of all to "remove 10 pounds."

Remember when photography was so easy? We shot a few rolls over the holidays and took them to the drugstore. I miss the anticipation of opening those envelopes of prints weeks later. Some were good, some were bad, but there wasn't anything you could do about it either way.

Speaking of Nova and moving targets. Digital photography makes you look like a superb photographer, because half the pictures you take are deleted and no one ever sees them. That's because most look like this:

Or, there are fingers in funny places:

Hey, at least it's her ear!