Category Archives: Photography

Photo-A-Day, Photography, Technology

Power in My Pocket

Osmo Pocket

Photo-A-Day 2.0 #00352

I went to Best Buy today and picked up the Osmo Pocket from DJI. Those are the drone people. Well, they make this tiny 3 axis gimbal camera that fits in your pocket. I have been looking for something that I can use when I go to Toy Fair in February so that I can take tons of video quickly and easily. I have the wireless Lav Mics, I just needed something that would have long battery life so I could film a lot. My old Samsung 6S just won’t cut it anymore. I needed something way more portable. I want to be as unencumbered as I possibly can this trip.

The funny thing is that this product has been on my Amazon.com wishlist for a while and my friend Becky removed it from the list. She recently got one and by some off chance I was surprised and kinda excited that maybe she had gotten me mine. I asked her but it was not the case, she accidentally removed it from my public list because she was one of the admins for it. Oh well, I had Best Buy money from recent campaigns so I picked this up for myself. I think that the thought of actually owning one gave me the push I needed to pick this up over something like a drone. I should get much more use out of this.

Photography

Take your Creativity to the Next Level with Adobe Photoshop Elements 2020

Partial Sketch Photo

The reviewer has been compensated in the form of a Best Buy Gift Card and free product. All opinions are my own.

I was going back through my blog posts to one from this day in 2010 where I was working with Adobe Photoshop Elements 7 but was then upgrading to Adobe Photoshop Elements 9. I’m pretty sure that my first ever version of the software was Adobe Photoshop Elements 4.0. I have been using some version of Adobe Photoshop Elements on a daily basis for well over 10 years now and I am excited about using Adobe Photoshop Elements 2020. Adobe Photoshop Elements has always been very accessible for novices to professionals. I love the interface and have learned so much over the years. I took a few Adobe Photoshop classes that have enhanced my knowledge of this program but now so much of what I know how to do can be done with the click of a button.

Exploring this product for this post has made me realize that I have been under utilizing the tools that are included with this product. There is so much more that I can do with it besides cropping images and making thumbnails for my YouTube videos. There are so many built in tools that make turning your photos into something even more amazing super easy. I was playing around with a few and came across the Meme Maker. I found a photo of my kids from the Granite State Comicon this past September. They were both in their costumes looking totally rough and tumble, ready to take on, or save, the world. So I made this image.

mememaker

You can easily pull in one of your exisiting photos and create a meme type image very quickly without having to pull it all together yourself. There were very few steps involved in making the meme. I did edit in in expert mode afterwards to move things and crop it down more, but I could have kept everything as is. There was even an effect called “Poster Edges” that I applied to give the kids more of a painted look with deeper black colors and smoothed features. To me the effect looked like a painted page of a comic book.

I am the keeper of our families photos. I coordinate everyone’s photos online and try to keep everything organized. I’ve also been called upon in the past to scan hundreds of family photos that were very old. Some photo restoration had to be done, too. Luckily there are tools for that as well in Adobe Photoshop Elements 2020. The tool is called Restore old photo and there is also a tool to help you take care of scratches and blemishes. These tools would have saved me so much time in the past where I did it all myself with the expert tools in the program. I usually run in expert mode and try to do everything myself. However, I think that in the future I will take the time to try out the tools that will help me to things quicker. I tried a few of them and was very pleased.

PopOuTWings

One of the Fun Edits that I tried was Out of Bounds. This one is very cool for making action type images from your existing ones. This would be great for sports shots and jumping photos and so much more. I thought that it would be cool to use on this image of Eva and these wings at our local BBQ joint.

I’m merely scratching the surface of what the new Adobe Photoshop Elements 2020 can do. You can also create beautiful images with photo effects, slideshows, and collages powered by the Adobe Sensei AI technology. The Adobe Sensei technology can also help you automate your photo-editing process. Here’s something I could have used early on when I started taking photos of Eva as a baby. See, I kept every single photo as if they were Eva herself. That means every really bad photo, blurry photo and bad expression photo was kept. With the auto photo curation based on quality, faces, and subjects that is powered by Adobe Sensei that would help me clean up all those extra photos that should have been cleared out when I took them in the first place.

Adobe_PhotoshopElements_Fuji_products

With all of my photos I could make many personailized gifts directly through the Adobe Photoshop Elements 2020. I am able to generate, and order over 140 photo gifts and prints, such as wall art, mugs, and phone accessories with the Prints & Gifts service. You simply open the images that you want to use to make your gift. Then you go to the Order Prints option and this brings you to prints and gifts. There you can choose so many options. This is a definite time saver and with all the built in features of Adobe Photoshop Elements 2020 you’ll be sharing your creativity in so many unique ways.