Wednesday, August 24, 2011

Guest Post: Ana

Today, while I am transitioning back to real life after my wonderful wedding weekend, Ana from Wonderland is visiting my blog!

I highly recommend that you visit her blog; you can also read her tweets via @anashanti or buy some of her beautiful prints on etsy.




hello dear Amy's readers :)

I am really pleased to be here today. this is my first ever guest post and I was thrilled with the opportunity when Amy accepted me. I feel so honoured! I'm a hobbyist photographer and I find real pleasure editing my photos so I thought it would be fun to share some more tips with you on the subject. I'm going to edit three photos I've never shared at my wonderland, just for you. it will be something artistically new ;) and I'm going to teach you how to do the mouseover effect, which is really cool.

* mouse over to see the before *

I use Elements 9 to edit my photos and here I started with a 'gaussian blur filter' to highlight the flowers and blur the background even more. then I added a layer mask and removed the blur from the flowers. I decided to use French Kiss textures in all of these photos (if you sign up for Leslie Nicole newsletter you'll get some textures freebies). so finally I added the texture to the photo and removed a little bit where it was necessary. HERE Kim Klassen teaches how to use textures in ten minutes. it's a great tutorial!

* mouse over to see the before *

I also love creating some effects on Picnik to give an instagram look to my photos. I like to 'soften', add some 'cross process' and 'film grain'. it's a free and resourceful photo editor online for those of us who don't have an iPhone and dream about it. these two photos had that treatment before I added a texture on Photoshop. don't they look vintage? so neat :)

* mouse over to see the before *

last but not least, here is the secret to do the mouseover effect. is pretty easy!

it's a simple javascript function that anybody can use, so here are some quick instructions on how to achieve it. choose the picture you want to display as the permanent image. do all the editing you wish and save for web. then select the original picture you want to use as the mouseover image, make sure you crop it to exactly the same size as the previous one and save for web as well. (if you used a 'frame' of any description make sure that that frame is also used for the original image). upload both images to your blog and get the url code that is returned. add the pictures url's to this javascript:



disclaimer: change the 'http original image jpg' and the 'http edited image jpg' by your own url codes. it is important you make sure that the quotation marks that surround the url links are single ( ' ) and not double quotes ( " ), as this has a relevance on how the script is executed. and that is it! have fun :)

dear Amy, thank you so much for having me here. I hope you've a blast on your wedding and a memorable honeymoon. xoxo

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

It's a very nice post :) My fav is the second one picture. I use Picnik too 'cause I had some problems with my laptop and I don't have any programs now :( Maybe you know more web sites like this?

Anonymous said...

:) we want to see pictures of the wedding!! I do :) you two are so special. hope Jon doesn't mind. you've a beautiful hair, by the way :) xoxo

Anonymous said...

dear Amy, my name is simply Ana (I'm not Maria) lol I called you Ammy and now you called me Ana Maria, what a pair! xoxo