How to use Photoshop - An Atly class that will rock your socks!

Eeek! Have you guys seen Melanie's new Photoshop class on Atly that's being offered!?

She's pre-selling spots at an awesome price and you guys do NOT want to miss it. I've been chatting with her a lot about it as she's helped me design our Bright Night prints, like this one below...

...and there are SO MANY great tools in this class.

Photoshop 100 is for users with little to no experience in Photoshop, or those who have a basic knowledge of the program. The course provides an overview of the entire program of Photoshop, and it focuses on the most important tools that will help you most.

This course is divided into 4 parts and covers the following:

First you immerse yourself in Camera Raw and go over basic adjustments like exposure, temperature, white balance, contrast, highlights, shadows, saturation–and what those mean and how they can change your photos. 

Then you dive into more detailed adjustments and edits such as removing blemishes and unwanted items in photos. This is then followed up by putting that final polish on your Photoshop skills by learning how to apply them in the real world. You focus on adding type, work on photo collages for blog headers, newsletters and more.

Plus, Melanie has a fabulous way of explaining things easily and clearly so that they're super easy to understand, which I know I desperately need, when learning something new!

You can preregister for Melanie's online instructional classes, by signing up here, so you're all ready to go when everything's released in a few days.

Dude, who doesn't want to know how to use Photoshop better!? - it's so helpful in all parts of my life, whether it's designing something at work, making up a church flyer or even just whipping up a few awesome photos for scrapbooks. I'm way excited to learn more too!

THANKS Melanie!

xo

Our Happy Place

Tonight was perfect. Every. Single. Part of it.

Cousins, fireworks, new bikes, sweaty-pink-faced kids, giggling, excited puppies, chatting with neighbors... this weekend can only get better.

We are so incredibly content here in this new house and new neighborhood, I can barely stand it. 

This is our Happy Place.

Can't wait to share tons more.

xoxo!

Shelf Building Bonanza in the Basement

Remember those lingering four carloads full of crap I spoke of in my last post?

No?

Well then let me give you a visual...

A third car garage is SO great! A spot for each car, and then a big ol' open area for all of your CRAP!

ughhhh... (insert eye roll here)

We were cheap and didn't want to invest in a bunch of boxes to pack up our stuff all nice because we knew we were just basically moving across town. Bins were expensive; and really, the majority of this stuff is just items from the rooms in our last houses basement, that we don't have spaces built for yet, but will once the basement in THIS house is finished.

The bins that you DO see are from our storage room. Memory boxes, pictures, keepsakes, etc... Those items (along with a bunch of this, for now anyway) need a new home. I know if I leave everything out here like this for too long it will gather tons of dirt, dust and items are bound to get broken.

We've been calling in contractors to give us bids for finishing off our basement, and it's going pretty well. We really just need to get the basic framing, drywall, paint and flooring installed. We like to DIY, but let's get real, THAT kind of stuff would take us way too much time and energy, so we're leaving it up to the professionals.

For the time being though, we ARE going to start in on a little project with my 'HandyDad', of building some simple shelves in our cold storage room under the front porch of our house.
This area is located inside the furnace room, and will eventually have a big exterior metal door on it, that will keep all the cold air from pouring into our main basement living space.