We’ve never been big on sending out Christmas cards. Too busy, too poor, too lazy, too pregnant for a picture…. the list of excuses goes on and on. Sometimes we’ve done e-letters. This year my second daughter, Savannah, demanded that we do a more official card. So, Savannah and Christi got input from Crystal Bowman and put together a Christmas tree of our kids. I took the pictures and then found a way to generate a Christmas card out of it. Drum roll please. Here is our combined attempt at the Davis family Christmas card for this year.
We did OK, right? I was able to practice a lot of Photoshop on this one. Here is the process I went through in Photoshop. After having taken the pictures, I found the white snow scene online to use as the background for the picture because this is the main picture I started with:
Basically, I cut them out of the picture in Photoshop and put them on the background picture I found on the web. If I was getting paid for this, I imagine I would have to use one of my own stock photos as background or buy some stock photo. I’ll have to study all the legal mumbo jumbo around using parts of work done by others. I did some color adjustments, brightened and colored the lights and the star, gave our mud snowman back some eyes and a mouth, did lot’s of fine tuning and blending of the edges, added in the text and filled with white behind it a bit so that it would stand out more. In the mean time, Caleb didn’t like his pained expression due to Josh’s knee in his back. So, I took his face out of this picture:
I almost used this as the main picture because I like Simon looking at the tinker toy star. But, I ended up going with him looking forward. Jonah didn’t look happy enough either. So, I took his face from here:
It really was a great sequence of shots with smiles coming and going very quickly. Finally, I took it back into Lightroom for some additional color treatment and touch up on the star and lights again since they darkened a bit from the preset I used. Here is the Photoshop picture before the Lightroom adjustments:
And the the final product again:
I love my kids!
4 comments:
I really enjoy reading about your photoshop and picture taking. Excellent work. There are quite a few sites with free pictures/backdrops that you can choose from - should you ever decide to do something that had to be copyright free or whatever. Keep up the good work.
Thanks Stephen. Good to know about the copyright free sites.
this turned out incredible! i would be quite proud.
Great card, Jeff! Glad to have one of my own hanging on my wall.
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