father’s day gift idea

I was absolutely shocked by the response I received when I half-heartedly posted this “kid art” donation idea.  Here are just a few of the sites that featured it … and to be honest, I stopped keeping track after a while:

simplesong
little.lovely
Next Door To Magic
urlesque
Alice Diana Boboc
You’ll Move Mountains

Many thanks to all of you … especially Suann, as I’m pretty sure she was the one that got the blogo-ball rolling! ;)

Anyway … I ended up receiving a couple of requests asking to buy the letters and also to use them in a fundraiser.  The only problem was … I didn’t feel right giving out images with other kids and didn’t want to deal with getting all the parents consent, etc. … so I decided to do new images … but this time with my own kids.

But … between schedules and the weather {I needed to take these outside, whereas the other images were taken in a gymnasium}, I just haven’t been able to take them.

Well … with my gift needs closing in on me … I couldn’t wait anymore!  I got the kids outside and we finally did it!

Crazy.  Pure craziness trying to get these images!  A little different than working with the smaller, more bendable children!  And I even had to pull the teen in for one of the images …

Overall, I’m super pleased and I think CJ’s going to love his Father’s Day gift!

WE  LOVE  YOU  DADDY!

And now for a behind the scenes look!!  Let’s just say I was thanking God that I had me some Photoshop skillz in my bag when it came to editing these images!

I took them around 5:00 pm … it was still light outside and for some reason, the images didn’t look this dark when reviewing them in-camera.

This is our letter “J” … straight out of camera {SOOC}.  And yes … it wasn’t until I pulled it up to edit, that I noticed we’d took the photo as a backwards J!

And here it is after cropping and editing.

Even after editing, some of the letters still have a bluish-cast background and there’s some serious shadowing in a few of them … but again, given my models, meltdowns, nearing dinnertime and patience rapidly depleting … I’m calling the project a success!

I was able to get the whole alphabet, including an exclamation point.

Here’s an outline to my editing {in case you’re geeky like that}:

1. bring image into Photoshop  {CS4}
2. under the adjustments panel, select brightness/contrast
3. brighten to taste :: contrast to taste
4. flatten layers
5. use totally rad “Warm it up, Kris!” {opacity to taste}
6. flatten layers
7. sharpen
8. run portraiture
9. use totally rad “Yin/Yang” to taste
10. flatten layers
11. clone & patch tools where needed
12. and then with this image only, I had to “flip image horizontal” so our letter wasn’t backwards

You likey? ;)

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