Today I am 33-years-old. If I could give the younger version of me some advice, I would say, “Keep those shoes! They will still be rad in 30 years! But maybe lose the knee socks.”
I mentioned earlier that I’m teaching an upcoming Photoshop course at work. I’m not an expert but I can make my way around the tool. I’m sharing my class in pieces. This post is about saving your cropping and resizing your images.
Cropping
To crop an image, select the Crop Tool from your toolbar. It looks like 
. Place your cursor on your image at where you would like to begin your crop. Left click your mouse drag your mouse so a dotted line appears where you would like to crop the image.
After you release your mouse, a box will appear on the image with the handles on your crop lines allowing you to change the size of your crop.
Select the handles and size your crop accordingly. When you have your crop marks as you want then, hit Enter.
Resizing
You can resize an image using the menus in Photoshop. Simply go to Image … Image Size … Type in the size you would like for your new image … OK.
In the drop-down menus you have the option to size your image by pixels, percentage inches, centimeters, etc. Work with whichever ones makes the most sense to you.
In nearly all occasions you will want to leave the “Constrain Proportions” box checked. This means that Photoshop will keep your image proportional to the original image.
Want to start from the beginning? View class 1, which reviews the Photoshop toolbar. View Class 2, which reviews pictures for print versus web.
As always, see something you disagree with or think is just plain wrong? Tell me! Seriously – I want to know.
Our garden is looking remarkably good this year considering we haven’t invested the time into it we should. The hibiscus plants are in full bloom right now and beautiful.
Pretty soon things are going to start looking a little crazy because someone (me) didn’t mark seeds from last year and so planted some unknown things near the front of the yard. What is growing is this beautiful, leafy plant well on its way to being 5 feet tall. Oops. More on that when the plant achieves its full height…
I love giving gifts. This is not to say I am good at gift giving. I have given several duds and spearheaded some huge group-gift flops.
Two of my favorite people to give gifts to are my nephews. The younger one is trickier. He is still really young and we all joke that all he really wants for a gift is a hug. (That’s probably not too inaccurate.) The older nephew is five-years-old. He’s full of energy and spunk and has all of the independent spirit that accompanies being the oldest child. I consider it a personal challenge to give him gifts that get him excited. A while back I gave him leftover change from different trips. The handful of large coins probably amounted the equivalent of 50 cents. But to him, it was priceless. For his birthday, Wonder Boy and I got him a wallet and put some bills from past trips in it. Maybe it was more like $1.50 this time? When he opened it one of his friends yelled out, “Colored money!” (I bet that kid gets super excited when his parents play Monopoly.)
Being an aunt has lots of perks and I still think it’s super cute every time I’m called Aunt Kate. But one of my favorite parts is giving awesome gifts.
I think this stems from having an awesome Godmother. Mine still gets me a gift every birthday and Christmas and I’m in my 30s! Two of my favorite gifts have been from my godmother, Fish. When I was maybe 7 or 8 she got me a camera. It was the real deal and came in a camera bag. I can guarentee you I took some terrible photos with it but had a great time doing it. A few years later Fish outdid herself by getting me a crimping iron. But this was no ordinary crimper. It didn’t put boring crimps into your hair. It put stars and hearts in it. Practically speaking, this was crazy because hair moves to much to keep shapes as specific as start and hearts. But at the age of 10, I thought this was phenomenol.
The crimper below is not the one I had when I was younger. I doubt I would have thought it was nearly so chic if it’d had Powerpuff Girls on it.
Everyone has quirks to how they work. Here’s one of mine. When I go out shopping just for fun, as opposed to when I go out to get a specific item, I will only buy something if I have more than 1 thing. If I only find 1 thing, I decide it’s not worth waiting in the checkout lane and put the item back. Even if I spent an hour shopping before I found said item. It’s not entirely logical.
Once I find more than 1 item, as in 2, then everything is fair game and I am much more apt to throw random things into my cart. It’s dangerous. And my pocketbook is most vulnerable by endcaps. They just feature so many random things that I can rationalize needing.
This past weekend I went to The Container Store, which is a little too much like a religious experience for me, and was in heaven. I went in with some specific items in mind so I had my 2+ items before I really even started. In the end I restrained myself pretty well. (I’ll get a second go at the store when I exchange 1 item in the upcoming weeks.) In fact, I didn’t add anything extra to my cart until I cruised by the last endcap before the checkout aisle.
When I saw the staple-free stapler, I had to have it. And so now I do.
And I’m pretty sure Wonder Boy is reading this and thinking, “This is why I am the one who does the grocery shopping.”
Powered by WordPress & Theme by Anders Norén
