After I had been digi scrapbooking for a couple of years I started getting frustrated with my layouts – they simply were not as fabulous as I wanted them to be. I did some gallery browsing and pulled up some layouts that I loved and studied them. I realized that the pictures on those layouts were stunning and that mine were fairly bland. So I looked into what I could do to get better pictures. I settled on three things: 1)Buy a better camera (mine was ancient). 2)Work on my composition. 3)Learn to edit my photos in PSE and actually spend some scrapping time working on the pictures.

The first I can't help you with – you might need to do some saving up on your own. The second is still not a specialty of mine but I'm working on a few tutorials and also hope to link you up to some great help in the free member and class subscription areas, so stay tuned. The third option, though, is going to be covered in Perfect Pictures - our Featured class this month!

We will be digging deep into many different sections of PSE to work on making our photos simply gorgeous to fit in on our amazing layouts!  I just posted the first part of lesson 1 this morning.  It will walk you through how to use many of the different aspects of the Enhance menu.  We will look at lightening shadows, brightening pictures, working with levels and curves, chancing the picture to black and white, altering the color and tone of pictures, and more.  It is really going to be too much information to take in all at once, but you can pick a few things at a time to play with and practice.  The more you practice, the faster and more natural it will become and you will be able to make your photos shine in no time!

Here are a couple of the pictures that I used in this first lesson:

Before - Notice how dark this photo was.

And here is the after:

And then we did this one.  See how white washed it is:

With some color corrections:

And in black and white:

And then we looked at this blurry picture:

And were able to do this to it:

If you are a class subscriber you can head here to see the lesson.  If you would like to try out our class subscription we are offering a free week trial!