Valentine's Day Cards

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The photographs of these beautiful children were shot indoors using natural lighting, a tall ladder and white fleece fabric. The photographs were cropped into squares using Photoshop. The E needed a little extra fabric, and so I used the eye dropper tool to match the color, and filled in the extra area using the brush tool at 50% opacity to soften the edges. This same effect can be accomplished using the clone stamp. I worked on a 30 inch square image, brush stroked red, adding each letter as a 5 inch square. Their borders are separate images opened at 6 inch square and colored using the brush tool (100% opacity) using a eye dropper of color off of one of the reds in the photo. I used guide lines throughout to help with placement of letters and border images. The heart is a 13 square inch image with a 14 square inch image of the darker red image layered behind it. I then cropped the final piece using the rectangular marquee tool with a fixed ration of 5x7. It would have probably been easier to open the first large background image at a ratio of 5x7 but I tend to open a giant "canvas" and work from there. It definitely took a couple of hours to create on photoshop, while "watching" the super bowl at my neighbors house...who was playing? Check out some of the other photos I took at their shoot.