As promised, here’s a little photoshop tutorial that will show you how to salvage an image by using a piece of another image.

The base image is the one I want to use, but I have a leaf covering the boy’s eye.  I found another image from the series where his eyes are free from any leaves.

All I have to do is isolate the area I want to use and drag it to my “base” image to hide the “offensive” leaf.

The tutorial is a bit simplified.  If I were doing this for the client I would spend more time massaging the final image.

This is at the very least a good place to start.  If you’re looking to get more in depth instruction you should consider registering for one of my upcoming Photo Mommies Workshops.

The tutorials for the workshop are more detail oriented.

Once you understand the principles behind this stuff you can play around with all kinds of options and variables.

In any case, have some fun with it……I hope it helps.

Ok, it’s just about officially winter, even here in Arizona. Take advantage of whatever leaves you have left and have some fun.

If you want to get the quintessential leaf toss photograph you need to be aware of a few things.

You need to make sure your people don’t look up too high into the air after tossing the leaves or you’ll see nothing but chins and nostrils.

The other big annoyance is that you’re gonna wind up with the vast majority of your pictures being ruined by random leaves covering up peoples’ faces.

You just have to make sure you shoot enough frames to get a really good one, or have enough Photoshop skills to strip a good “non leaf covered” face for the one that is blocked.

In fact, while I was writing this post I decided to do a video photoshop tutorial of how to do just that.  If everything goes well, I’ll post it on the blog tomorrow.

In the meantime, if you live in an area where the trees aren’t completely bare, good luck with the  leaf tossing or leaf fights or whatever else kind of “leaf activities” you decide capture with your camera.

For those of you who have been wanting to sign up for the next photo workshop, I’ll be announcing the February starting date pretty soon.