Now that that's out of the way, let's talk about Photoshop! It's as powerful a tool as my camera itself, and when I have free time I want to spend on professional development, I often teach myself how to make the best of this incredible resource. Lately I've been doing a fun thing where I take older portraits I did before I knew anything about editing, and give them the full sparkly Photoshop treatment.
One thing I've learned to do it erase the original background (which is often the black or white 4 foot by 8 foot v-flats I had made) AND add in new colored backgrounds, gradients, or sometimes just silly stuff for fun.
For example, check out this fun pic of my friend Jenni Prokopy, the Chronic Babe herself! (Check out her website and you'll see many more photos taken by yours truly, not to mention a ton of brilliant resources helping women "living kickass lives in spite of chronic illness.") Jenni truly is a ray of sunshine and an inspiration to many.
This is a silly fun photo we took during a video shoot awhile back, and I thought it was just begging for some fancy-ing up. Not only did I remove the plain white background, I drew fun colorful circles behind her for extra fun!
Truly, this is a great time to be an autodidact - there's nothing I want to learn about Photoshop and its companion software Lightroom that I can't find multiple tutorials for online. Look for more examples from my "Photoshop remixes" series coming up soon!
