Soft Light Tutorial and fun stuff!

Can I say how giddy I am right now?? I just completed this layout for the Goodie Box Girls challenge for April and I'm so happy with it. I had these photos sitting on my desk for weeks - just begging for some loving tender care, and my mind was drawing a big fat blank! The challenge for this month is to use "one" - use ONE in the title, use ONE photo, ONE color...whatever. This idea came to me almost immediately! Love how challenges get my brain a workin'!~ "1 + 1 = ONE" The patterned papers, chipboard tag, and felt flowers were from an awesome paper pack "Urban Rapsody" by K&Company (available at Michaels), the ghost letters were from Heidi Swapp, and the Felt number stickers were from Martha Stewart.

I attached the ghost letters with brass colored brads, and I created the "Attached at the heart" tag in Word. See my horrid handwriting that I am starting to get used to? LOL!

Okay, for a bit of exciting news (for us). My daughter "TJ" got her ears peirced on Saturday!

That was our birthday gift to her for her 8th birthday. We did it a week early because she is going to a swimming party the same day as HER party, and I wanted her ears to have some time to heal before then. This girl was SO awesome at the boutique. I asked the gals there to put them in at the same time, and they did an amazing job. TJ didn't even blink when they went in. I was FAR more terrified than she was. I think I held my breath until my lungs imploded. LOL! No need for anxiety, though, because she was a trooper! And don't they look cute? I couldn't get a nice shot of them (they are tiny) but hopefully the arrows point the way ;)

We also got a steal of a deal on a nice deck set - the table, 6 chairs, ottoman, side table, and umbrella. Zellers had a $600 set on for half price. We spent some of our tax return and bought it for our big deck out back. So excited to have it! I can picture myself reclining on one of the chairs, a strawberry smoothie in one hand, reading my favorite book, relaxing and watching the children skipping through the yard singing kumbaya. Okay....scratch the last part,, but the rest is plausible! We wanted some extra space to eat because we are having family visiting for TJ's baptism in a couple of weeks. Hopefully the weather will cooperate for us to have our big lunch outdoors. We'll see ;)

Quick tutorial today - and for all photoshop users. This might be something you already know, but it's a nifty trick anyone can do in seconds that will give any photo a nice boost.

1. Open your photo (sorry, you won't see a huge difference in my example - it's not the best photo to showcase this, but I use this trick a LOT in my post-processing.)
2.Make a copy of your photo on a new layer by clicking Layer>New>Layer via Copy, or do what I do and click Ctrl+J for the shortcut. What this does is duplicate your photo on a new layer (see right hand side of the screen) 3. All you do now is change the blend mode of that top layer you just created by clicking on the little downward pointing arrow beside the word "normal" in the little white box. A list will pop up. Click on "Soft Light". This changes the blend mode from Normal to Soft light. 4. You might like the effect as is! If so, flatten and save. I usually lower the opacity of the soft light layer to around 25%-50% depending. This photo needed about 30%. Voila! Simple, but effective. Doing this adds some oomph to a drab photo. You can also play around with the different blend modes - try, for example, overlay mode. Interesting! I'll show you a fun technique with that sometime :)