Love is in the air!! Valentine’s day is one of my favorite holidays to decorate for, make crafts of and celebrate! Maybe it’s all the pink and red, or the candy and cookies, or heart shapes…or maybe it’s just the LOVE! Either way lots of animals have fallen in love in this adorable Valentine’s day themed kit–Twiterpated by A-Manda Creations! You’ll get some puppy love, giraffes, monkeys, frogs, mice, kitties, even fish kissing in the fish bowl (my favorite!) There are tons of hearts and flowers and other love themed goodies in this kit as well. Everyone in this kit is TWITTERPATED!!
I grabbed one of JenC Designs templates from her January Template Grab Bag and made this layout. The colors were perfect to go with this new outfit that I made my daughter and all those hearts show how much she loves it!!!
I’ve turned this layout into a qp for you today, enjoy!!!
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I’m homesick. The snow has turned to rain and outside it is muddy & gray. It matches my mood. My home, what I think of as home, is no longer there. Or rather, not part of my family anymore. My parents sold our home, the one in California, years ago. But it is this home I’m homesick for.
I miss yelling through the house for my sisters. I miss the smell of my mom’s cooking. I miss the big back yard, the constant sun, and the fruit trees. I miss taking the day off from school (technically it was playing hooky) and cruising over the Santa Cruz mountains, on 17, or even highway 9 or 84, to grab lunch at the beach. I really, really miss bagel dogs.
I don’t know how my mom did it all those years. So far from her mom, her sisters and brothers. I remember anxiously waiting for letters from home (Holland), in those blue Par Avion, super light-weight envelopes. One time my Opa even sent a cassett, with his voice recorded reading my favorite story out loud.
Nowadays, things are much better. We have skype! It’s almost like having my mom & sisters come to visit. I’m in absolute love with skype and multi-person video conferencing. It’s not the same as yodelling through the house, but it puts a huge smile on my face. I’d still rather have them right here, with me. For reals.
I am surrounded by brown eyed grand children. All but 3 got their grandpa’s eyes. Big, brown, and RED in a lot of photos. I’ve never been able to make the red eye tool work to my satisfaction in Photoshop. I tried. To the point of wanting to bang my head on the desk…I tried. Fortunately, I found a work around. It works for me and it might work for you too.
This is a pic of 2 of my grand girls. As you can see both are sporting big browns, but Makenna has what we lovingly refer to as “fish eye”. That just won’t do on my layout so we’re going to fix it up.
Have you got a photo like this? Go ahead; get it out and work along. You’ll be surprised at how fast and easy this is.
I’m working in CS5 but this is pretty easy so you can probably follow along in most any editing software.
I use “CTRL J” to duplicate my layer and add a layer mask. It’s the little square with the circle at the bottom of the layers palette.
I want to work up close so I’ll use the short cut CTRL + ALT + 0 (zero) to bring the girls to 100%.
I want to add a layer below so with layer 1 selected hold down ALT and click the New Layer icon.
Choose a soft round brush. Adjust the size to just a little larger than the red portion of the eye. Set the color to black.
Reduce the opacity on Layer 1 to about 50%
Select layer two and make one dot with the brush on each of the eyes. It will look a little scary but that’s the goal.
Reduce the opacity Layer 2 to about 20%. You need to see the white reflections. Switch back to Layer 1 and select the layer mask. Change your brush color to white and reduce the brush size to match the white reflection dots. Make a dot over each of the reflections.
Adjust Layer 1 back to 100%. You may need to play with the opacity of Layer 2 so the eyes look natural but it shouldn’t take much.
Here is my final step.
Easy breezy with plenty of room for error. That’s a good thing. Now all you have to do is find the kit you want to use with those gorgeous perfectly photographed eyes.
My pick is “Today”. It’s a beautiful collaboration between eqrAveziur and The Urban Fairy. It’s perfect for scrapping everyday photos and I fell in love when I saw it. As it happens, it’s also on sale so that makes it even better don’t you think? Here’s a look at the Page Kit but there is also a set of glitter elements and a journaling pack.
Go ahead, give it a try. Get the red out. 
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