fun with photoshop

i realized recently that because of scott's student status, we can get education-related discounts of software ... specificially adobe cs5.5 design standard, home of indesign, illustrator, acrobat pro, and photoshop.  i acquired that little bundle for myself for $229 (around $1300 without the student discount) as an early birthday present and have been having a delightful time with it.  i'm working on a project in indesign (more on that at a later date), am utterly confused by illustrator ... but photoshop.  oh, photoshop.

my first stop was to download the pioneer woman's action sets (here for the photoshop cs versions, or here if you're an elements user like my dad), look through some of her action set tutorial posts, and start playing.  for some of the actions, you just press a button and it's done, for others you get to play with settings.  i have yet to do anything other than using actions in photoshop yet, but it's an easy first step in learning how the program works since it can be super intimidating opening up photoshop for the first time.

one of my favorite pictures thus far, entitled "swinging in sunshine":
before:

and after:

i'm kind of captivated by it!  i'm sadly not sure what all steps i took - i saved it in jpg format (which deletes layer information, ie the things that tell you what you did to the picture) rather than photoshop's format (psd) so that i could post it on facebook.  clearly next time i need to save it in psd AND jpg just for good measure.  i think i used pioneer woman's boost, seventies, bring on the eyes, and sunshine ... maybe more, maybe less.