Quick digital Study in Photobooth & Photoshop

Wow - so time flies. The holidays and the new year came and went. We unfortunately hit and killed a deer that jumped out in front of our car just after Thanksgiving, and our daughter turned 1 at the end of 2007. There's been a lot going on since my last post, and obviously the blog has gotten the short end of the proverbial stick. My most sincere apologies to the Niblets.

So with that said, here's the inaugural post of 2008. After installing Mac OSX Leopard, I've discovered a fun program called Photobooth. It's a program that you can use with your iSight camera to take pictures of yourself or others a la the old photobooths at arcades, etc. There are a myriad of effects that you can add over the photo including different distortion filters. It's really a simple concept, and as you can see from the examples, the results can be hysterical and proves to be a good activity to do with your friends and family.

I started with a picture from Photobooth, took it into Photoshop, placed a red color overlay layer on it as an "underpainting," then started painting digitally on a separate layer. When I was done, I cropped it to a different proportion since the original photo was in the 4:3 ratio horizontally. I wanted this to have a more vertical portrait cropping. It was pretty quick, it only took me about 45 minutes from start to finish.