The trick I thought was so neat was when we were at her daughter’s wedding and she took two photos of my son and his family. In one photo, everyone but the baby was smiling nicely and in the other, the baby smiled but not the parents. There was a time we would have had to settle for those pictures.

But thanks to digital software magic, Bridget was able to take the smiling baby and put her in the arms of the smiling mom and dad. And to look at the photo, you would never know it wasn’t the original.

If you have special photos that need editing, or you need to add a person or subtract some distracting background, find a Photoshop specialist and get the memories you’ll want to keep forever. And please share with me if you’ve already done so.

Technorati Tags: Photoshop Elements, editing photos

I found this video and description that shows some of the incredible possiblities when the author touched up an old photo of her grandmother – although I’m not quite sure how they knew her hair was supposed to look like that:

photo touchup
This is a photo of my grandmother . The photo is the only one we have of her at this age . So I did a restore on the photo and increased the photo res from a very small , wallet size to a full 8×10 . This was done in Adobe Photoshop cs3 . The final picture took about 6 hours of touch up and finish work . I just wanted to show the bulk of the initial work for this vid . When I restore vintage photos or just do touch ups,they can be very time consuming . The music bed or backing track used in this photoshop cs3 example is Aerosmith Dream On acoustic version . This photo was in extreme decay and bad shape . If you would like more information about Digital Design House , please visit our website www.digitaldesignhouse.com

Note from Carol: I don’t have time to learn another software program right now, but if you’ve used an application like Photoshop to fix any of your old photos, I would love to hear what you’ve done.

Technorati Tags: Photoshop Elements, Adobe Photoshop, photo restoration

A broken camera is not something you want to think about and if you can help it something you don’t want to deal with, but no matter how careful you are these things can still happen. Or your child can pick up your camera and drop it, or in my case, my husband was carrying the camera by its strap and it hit the door hard enough to break. The zoom lens would not work at all. Our 1st stop was to our local wolf camera store, the cost to just look at it was fairly high, and then they had to send it off to their repair people and didn’t even seem sure that it was something that could be repaired. So we researched online and found digitech. We sent the camera off and with just a short wait we received back a perfectly repaired camera with a lower price for repair then the other company was charging just to look at it, and even the shipping charge from California to Tennessee was inexpensive. I was very happy with this company, their prompt professional service and great prices.

Technorati Tags: broken camera, photography

Would you like to enjoy your family photos anytime you’re on your PC? You can do so fairly easily with free tools provided by Microsoft that will help you store, organize, view and in one case, edit your photos.

If your operating system is Vista, XP, or Windows 7, you can use Windows Live Photo Gallery. It can be downloaded from Microsoft if it’s not included with your operating system already. Get Windows Live Photo Gallery here. There’s a ton of information and instruction on the use of this tool and organizing your photos on Microsoft’s Windows site. You can also learn how to get pictures from your camera to your computer; and to convert your old photos to digital pictures.

Organizing your photos is easy and no different than organizing any other files on your computer. Just create and name folders in a manner that will allow you to find your photos easily. For example, you could have a folder named “Vacation Photos”, and within that folder, other folders named for the year the photos were taken, like “1990”, “1991”…you get the idea. If your operating system is Vista or Windows 7, you should store these folders within the Pictures folder provided.

Once you’ve got your pictures loaded, you’ll be able to view them using a slideshow, one at a time, or as a background or screen saver. Look around the Microsoft Windows site for more ways to have fun with your pictures. The operative word here is have fun; while learning about and trying new things.

Technorati Tags: managing photos, organizing photos

Do you know your family history? Will your Grandkids know yours?

There are many ways to preserve the past for future generations, for me and my family it will be mostly a story told thru photos. I use my photos to make scrapbooks that tell our family’s story. Photos help you remember more details when you are trying to write a family history and add more interest. My Grandkids will be able to look thru our albums and see where we lived, where we vacationed, things we did, etc.

As well as creating family albums of me and my children, I have created a family history album with as much information as I could find about our family heritage. Creating a family book is sometimes hard to do if you have broken family trees to deal with, I just used as much information as I could with the people that I could and didn’t worry about the rest. I didn’t want to get too overwhelmed so I just went back to when our families immigrated (on my side to Canada, and on my husband’s to the US)

I was able to find some information about my family on some of the genealogy sites, there are some free ones like familysearch and there are ones like one great family and ancestry.com that charge a fee but they offer more on their site. On ancestry.com I have found copies of actual documents about my family such as my great-grandfather’s military enlistment papers. Searching your family history is a time consuming project but can also be a lot of fun. The internet has made research so much easier and there are so many sites that are all about creating your family tree. There are also many books available, such as this one

Writing your own story will make it easier on your future generations when they want to know about their great-great grandparents.

Enjoy your family, the living most of all, but be proud of where you come from, brokenness and all. And remember that a picture is worth a thousand words but a family history is best if you can create it with a mix of photos, stories and documents.

Bridget

Bridget has some beautiful photos and slideshows on her site, so be sure and check it out. And if you’re in the Nashville area, she sells the framed photographs as well.

Technorati Tags: family history, photo albums, geneology