Do you photoshop your own photos?

Nope, I just do a lot of bicep curls and eat clean.

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I change lighting and saturation. D adds S to family photos when he isn’t there…sometimes dismembered going over a waterfall.

We have cropped a few people out of pictures in just this way!

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I use Lightroom and one year I took some photos of my sons for a holiday card. I later realized the street light behind them appeared to be sprouting from my younger son’s head. I removed it for the card.

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Young people who post on social media often have skills and will to alter photos. I know my DD who is gorgeous without any photo editing likes to make her legs longer, adds background on top or bottom so she is right in the middle, etc. now her photos look like she can be on the cover of the magazine not like she wasn’t beautiful before. I don’t have skills to do it and since I don’t post photos anywhere don’t care to learn how to do it.

@oldfort We always joked about that when the kids, nieces and nephews were dating and we were taking a group photo. While we never actually removed the person from the photo, everyone would mention it when seeing the framed photos at the in-laws house!

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My niece had a small covid wedding (35 people.) One of the attendees was her brother’s serious girlfriend. 6 weeks after the wedding the girlfriend dumped my nephew unexpectedly; it was not a pretty break-up. Niece was SO mad that this girl was in many of her wedding photos. So for Valentine’s Day, her H took her favorite photo of all the young people at the wedding to a professional photographer, who edited the ex-girfriend out and made them a framed enlargement. He did a great job and the bride was thrilled with this thoughtful gift from her hubby!

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Someone just told me that their wedding photographer wouldn’t let any of the plus ones in the majority of the family photos for that very reason!

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I don’t think she was in the family photos, but because it was such a small wedding she was in more of the casual photos than would be typical - and the group photo of the young people was special for my niece because it was her very closest friends and cousins, since that was all who were included on the short list. It would have been awkward to ask the GF to not be in that photo, but annoying after the fact that she was!

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Our photographer didn’t care.

BUT my MIL excluded me from all family photos until DH and I were married. This included things she had no business dealing with like pics of DHs siblings and us. Don’t get me going.

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Oh, my friend’s mil doesn’t allow spouses in photos with her and her husband and their three adult kids. She only takes pics of their nuclear family. My friend and her dh (also my friend) have been married 37 years!!

Last time they visited and were all on he beach she had someone take a photo of the five of them. Even though all the spouses were there. I mean, these are casual photos, but still. It’s perfectly fine to want one of the family or origin, but she NEVER wants one or cares if she gets one with the adult kids AND their spouses. I took one of the three spouses and posted it as, “the outlaws.” Lol

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Ok that’s worse than my MIL!

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My first photo editing was in 2000, when our first scanner came with photo editing software. I used photos from our Chicago wedding, cropped bride and groom, and dropped us into a picture from Maui. Then I sent it to my parents asking if they remembered our Hawaii wedding :grin:.

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All the time. I’m a graphic designer/web designer/social media coordinator. You betcha I fix my family photos too. I unwrinkle a shirt or open someone’s eyes or occasionally add in a missing person who came later to the event and missed the group photo that had already been taken.

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I’ve never photoshopped any of my photos but I’d like to start playing with it. Which FREE app do you recommend for a beginner?

Photoshop is an Adobe product. Saying “Photoshop” when you just mean photo editing is like saying “Kleenex” when you mean tissue.

Can’t advise on free photo editing apps because I’ve had a Photoshop license (now Adobe Creative Cloud subscription) for decades. Wish I could help. Hope somebody else has some suggestions.

I loved my old PhotoShop Elements 8 software and used it for years - understood how to do the editing I wanted to do. Then I got a new computer with Windows 10 and the old software disc didn’t work with it. And PhotoShop has become a subscription based service. I just wanted some kind of single purchase software that would do much the same as the PhotoShop. I’ve been trying Corel PaintShop Pro 2022 which I got cheap on a Black Friday deal but am not very comfortable with it. Then again, I don’t do much photo editing any more like I used to when I did tons of albums.

Incidentally, I do say Kleenex but that’s the brand we use! I say “ride share” instead of Uber, though.

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Photoshop Elements is still a purchase, not a subscription.

Thank you. I actually purchased it years ago and never used it. :roll_eyes:
Probably was a huge learning curve for me.

The more recent editions (and perhaps yours as well) have guided edits that help you along as well as auto-adjust options (eg. auto contrast, auto brightness, etc). They have a webpage at https://www.adobe.com/products/photoshop-elements/features.html as well as the “AI and automation” tab on that page.

I agree that it can be overwhelming and I probably only use a small subset of the features. But I am happy with the small touchups I do (brightening areas that are too dark, fixing tilted photos, etc. I have a list of steps I use on each picture, takes about 15-30 seconds

  1. auto levels
  2. auto color correct (see if like it better)
  3. color correct using picker if needed
  4. fill light (sometimes selecting specific portion of pic)
  5. look to see if pic would look better with cropping
  6. adjust tilt if needed
  7. save as best JPEG quality
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