free encouragement

This is such an excellent collaboration booooom and design for mankind have teamed up to make a set of postcards with lovely words of encouragement and bits of arty pictures to go with them.   love the idea of this and have sent some photos off.  so fingers crossed!

To read all the other words of encouragement have a look on boooooooom.   There are some really really lovely things said, makes you feel warm inside!!!

scanner art

I discovered a technique of taking your photo using a scanner instead of a camera!  I thought it sounded fun so I gave it a try:

I quite like the effect, it looks like I am underwater, I might experiment a bit more with this!

lovely lisa

I have finally had a chance to play with some of the photos I took Lisa.  I am really pleased with how this one turned out.

www.flickr.com/photos/cazhancox/2989442688

photoshop tricks

I wanted to share this quick little photoshop trick which gives images that lovely vintage feel.  I have been experimenting a lot with loads and loads of different techniques, spent hours researching different tools and techniques, sometimes forgetting to write down what i am doing which is not very helpful when it comes to getting that effect again!   So I thought I'd share one of my ways to get a vintage effect.  I must add that I didn't make up this particular trick entirely on my own, I have used a quite well know technique that I found instructions for on YouTube: www.youtube.com/watch?v=O7Tv52F5nlQ  and tweaked it a bit to get it to work for me so here goes:

Open up you image:

Then create a curves adjustment layer and on each individual channel set the curve like this:

Sometimes the curves need to be adjusted and tweaked slightly according to each individual image but this is a good starting point.  It should make the tones in the image look something like this:

As you can see from the above image it is almost there but, this is the part that I have played with for ages to get right!  I feel that just using curves makes the image lack punch somehow so I like to up the contrast a bit using levels and and sometimes add a selective colour adjustment layer and increase the blacks.  This really gives the image punch and adds some depth to it.  Once you have played with Levels and Selective colour the final result should look something like this:

I hope that you will find this tutorial useful, thanks for looking x