party animals

Thanks Collin for the sweet & funny Valentine! I may need to change my password before I really regret it! ;)Yaya stayed home with our girlies and we went out for a night on the town. My mom told us to stay out to 2 am and have fun.

6:00 Dinner at Thai Ruby (Our fave!!)
6:50 Done with dinner (We've learned to become fast eaters with 2 little kiddos.)
7:00 Run into family at dinner (I guess I shouldn't be surprised since it's a family favorite! :)
7:10 Hit up the local shiny bowling lanes. (When the clerk hands you shoes that are still steaming from the last gal you know you're in for fun!)
7:15 Pick out my 10 lb ball
8:30 Together we bowled a whopping 240 score... I contributed double digits to that! :)
8:45 Figure out if we should go to a movie or go home
9:00 Picked up some ice cream and movie
9:17 We are home
We are real party animals huh? ;) We did have a blast-hope you did too!

I'm still working through your questions:
mj said...
this is my burning questions...where do you learn about all the fun Photoshop stuff you do? did you take a class or did you just play around until you figured it out?
-Hi mj!
I learned some Photoshop tricks from a couple sites. This one has some great free tutorials. I didn't take a class, just messed around like you said. :)

Dave and Mindy said...
I love the look of your photos and was wondering if you used a specific action to create the aged/muted color look? It's great.
-Hi Mindy (or Dave) ;)
When I don't manually mess around with my photos in Photoshop there are some actions I like to use. My friend Maggie Holmes is a scrapbooker slash photographer & now a Photoshop Action genius!! She sells her secret to great photos here on her Photography blog. I love them!!


Here I used the one called 'urban' from her Color MIX Action set. Turn down the opacity to about 50%.

Before & After: Here I used her 'color pop' from the Color action set & 'urban' from the Color MIX action set.

This is my cute sis-in-law Bethany! Or at least most of her. :)
I used one of Maggie's funky actions 'urban cross' from Color MIX set. "I think it works best with Blues and Reds.

The best part about Maggie's actions is that recently she made them compatible with Adobe Photoshop Elements! Like I said-genius! :)
They are super easy to use, my only tip is to turn the opacity way down maybe 50-60% depends on the photo & if you want to mix actions just flatten the image after running each one.
Let me know if you have any questions.
Happy Monday! :)