It’s an interactive test to see how well you can kern your lettering.  I got 77% – can you hopefully beat my pretty sad score?  Try it.

And for an even harder design-based game, try their letter-shaping test.

And, like usual, here’s a list of the types of things we did in Photoshop to finesse the image:

• Darkened the background by duplicating the original image layer, setting it to the Multiply blend mode, and painting white into a mask on that layer to specify where to make the background dark.
• Shifted the skin color.  The exposure was just too yellow in the skin tones, so we created a Hue/Saturation adjustment layer that desaturated the yellow-pink range and shifted it more towards red, and then painted a mask where we wanted that effect to happen, which was just in the skin areas.
• A little bit of dodging and burning on the skin, to add some more shape.  Iff you look at the forearms, you can see how they’re darker towards the sides, and lighter in the center, more so than in the original.

It’s a pretty cute pose, that we’re amazed they were able to pull off.  (Having a newborn of our own, that would not have been possible for us to do!)

Here’s a list of some of the Photoshop
work that was done:

• Got rid of a slobbery wet spot (that was more noticeable when the blue sweater got brighter) and the beige dog on his sweater with the clone and healing tools.
• Colored the zipper handle blue to be less distracting.
• Extended the cabinet top horizontally with the clone tool (being careful to keep the reflections consistent)
• Cloned out the mommy’s head (as she had to hold the baby up from behind)
• Rotated the image a bit to get the top of the cabinet to be square on the card.
• Brightened up the colors a bit, especially the blues.
• Added text to the book spine

Here’s a post about the baby’s perspective on the photo shoot:
Baby Photo Shoot Details

This is the original image, straight-out-of-camera.

I always shoot in Raw+Jpg, so I usually like to take the Raw image into Adobe Camera Raw for some quick processing (usually less than 5 mins, though this one admittedly took longer).  This is what I got after running it through Camera Raw:

Notable things that were done in Camera Raw (which comes with Photoshop):

• Cropped it tighter
• Shifted Temperature towards Blue and Tint towards Green more.
• Raised Exposure a touch and added quite a bit of Fill Light.
• Added a bit of Blacks and a lot of Contrast to counteract the “fakeness” that Fill Light can create.
• Almost maxed out Clarity, and added quite a bit of Vibrance.
• In the Hue shift section, pushed Greens all the way towards the blue end, and pushed Aquas most of the way towards the blue end.
• In the Saturation tab, saturated Reds, Oranges, Blues & Magentas quite a bit, and desaturated Greens and Aquas quite a bit.
• Added a little bit of a vignette in the Post Crop Vignetting section.

Then I took the resulting image into Photoshop, because there were some last things that were easier for me to do there.  This is the final image:

Some of the things done in Photoshop:

• Straightened the image a bit by pulling the top right corner up a bit.
• Noise removal (using the Noise Ninja plugin, though I could have done a similar job with Camera Raw’s noise removal.)
• Cleaned up the stain on the concrete with the clone tool.
• Copied image over it self in Hard Light mode (at about 50% opacity)  to add some more bold contrast to the colors.
• Did a high pass filter on the image (making it mostly gray with subtle edges) and put that on top in Hard Light mode to add some extra sharpening.

So just for better comparison, here are the before and after images one more time:

You can definitely get away with a more processed look with objects like this than you can with typical pictures of people.  Let me know what you think – is it too processed, or does it work well for you?

Is there a place for something similar to our cards in digital form yet, or is the world not quite ready to view them in that medium only?

On the one hand, there is something to be said about being able to hold a nice-looking card in your hands, and feel the stiffness of the cardstock.  Something hard to describe, but it has the feeling of being substantial.  We see digital images online everyday but there’s no difference between them in print quality or paper quality, so they can all be more equal, but at the same time, none are as likely to feel unique or memorable.

On the other hand, we are in a time of going green, where it seems more wasteful to send out tons of paper cards and envelopes, especially when most people throw cards away shortly after receiving them (not that people throw THESE cards away!).  We are also in an age of Facebook, and having 782 “friends”, and while it doesn’t make financial sense to send out that many paper baby announcements usually, you would like many of your friends to be able to at least see the announcements.

With these things in mind, we’d like to pose the following questions.  If you vote on them, you get to see how everyone else voted too!

Take Our Poll
Take Our Poll


Take Our Poll

And please feel free to leave any thoughts about this in the comments section as well –