My Sweet friend Jenn turned me on to some fabulous photo actions by Holly McCaig and I have been playing with my pictures and LOVING what I see. I also bought some photo actions of Michelle Pearson that I'm waiting on getting that will be fun to play with too.

It's been really tough lately as my trusty little Kodak camera is slowly dying a horrible death and taking my great photos along with it. I am itching to buy a Digital SLR but the money's just not there, so I will have to play with my photos more and more until I can afford one. There's a silver lining in that cloud though, because it will only make my pictures better and when I get an awesome camera, they will rock even more!!!!

This first picture was just BLAH until I used Holly's action and it just popped out. The Bubbles were so shiny and you could see the HAIR on Melissa's arms. It was just incredible how it saved some pretty boring un-usuable pictures!!!! Go get it and play!!! You won't be disappointed!! I have never really thought much about photo correction, but I'm realizing now that it's ESSENTIAL if you want to get better results with your digital scrapping. I don't know WHY I never thought of it, but I didn't! Sure, I would use brightness or contrast to punch up a picture or MAYBE use levels very basically - but never anything else. I wanted to spend my time SCRAPPING!!!!!! Now i"m finding that if I don't like the picture, I won't like the scrap either!!! So, here we go on my journey to become a better photographer too. This layout was done with all papers by me and the doodles by Susan McCormack.

This second one is using Holly's Actions again. It was so muddy and dark that it was rejected as a passport photo. I grabbed Holly's action and played around with it and this picture just POPPED!! I was so ecstatic to see my daughter show up so beautifully!!!!! It is amazing to me that when you fiddle with settings in Photoshop - things you never saw before become evident. I actually did some photo retouching as Melissa had scratched her nose and she had a huge scab on the bridge and I just HAD to take it out!!! This layout is very special to me as it is the first one I've done with nearly all of my own elements and papers!! I used Gina Cabrera's binder clip, cardboard and stitches. The bling, ribbon and backgrounds were my own.

SO that's what I'm up to - scrapping, designing and focusing on picture enhancement - and dreaming of a digital SLR...