Last week, I went to Orlando to a Photoshop Down and Dirty Tricks seminar for work. These classes are run by Scott Kelby, editor of Photoshop User and Layers Magazine. This guy is seriously bad ass when it comes to Photoshop. The classes were incredibly interesting and I learned a lot of new tricks.

In one of the classes, he showed us how to create that super high contrast, grungy effect to photos that seems to be quite popular nowadays.

This is a photo I took at Ft. Desoto beach ages ago for a photography class at AI. I can’t remember the names of the girls in the photo, but I think the one on the right was an interior design major and the girl on the left was my professors sister. I realize this isn’t the highest quality photo I’ve ever taken, but I needed something with some contrast that was fairly close up on the face.

This is the final result. It’s basically a 21 step process that involves layer masking, dodging and burning, changing layer blending modes and the high pass filter. I haven’t really played around with photoshop in awhile, so it was kind of fun to take what I learned at the seminar and brush up on my own skills. I think I’m going to watch some of these tutorials and play around some more!

Tags: creative, photos, Photoshop, random

Dave’s Pez dispenser collection has grown yet again to he point where he needed to get a new bookshelf for his latest additions. A few months back, we picked up a really hideous but cheap one at Ikea for like 30 bucks. We put it together and put some of his giant dispensers on it, but we wanted to get some staking organizers like he had for his other bookshelves so all the normal sized Pez could be displayed easily. We both thought that those old school spice racks would wok perfectly for this, the only problem was we couldn’t find any like what we needed. We searched for spice racks at like 10 different stores and finally found a set that would work at Bed Bath & Beyond. Of course, they only had ONE left. Then we went to Home Depot and looked for something that we could use to hold the Pez in place. This was really important because when you put that many on a shelf, one sudden move could knock all of them over. We found some floor stripping that worked perfectly. It had a lip on it that was just the right size so the foot of the dispensers could go in there without budging. We cut the floor stripping to the right size and super glued it to the spice racks. Our shelves are perfect and soon they will be filled with more Pez! Hopefully they will restock the spice racks we bought at Bed Bath & Beyond so we can make more.

Tags: crafts, creative