Day 23/365 Richie and Stephen

This is the only picture I got around to taking today.  I've taken so many pictures since we had two snow days and my family party last night that  I am re-charging everything and I had the Danny Lee cello concert today at the Sheldon, so I am not going to be too creative today.

I will, however, tell you a new trick I've learned in Photoshop.  I'm sure that this can be done in Gimp as well and I really like the results.  First, go to Image>mode>desaturate and choose Grayscale.  Then hit Image>mode>Duotones and choose the 2 colors.  Then hit Image>mode>RGB colors and OK.  This will get the image into a black and white or black and ? and then make the image editable.  Now, you can click on Image>adjustment>color balance and play with the colors until you find the colors you like.

Now, this is what I recently discovered that is really making my latest pictures "pop" for me: Image>adjustments>shadow/highlight.  When you first click on this, the picture looks really bad.  Play with the amount of shadow and highlight (an adjuster bar) and I'm finding that I can really get some neat highlights on my pictures.  I'm using Photoshop CS2.  I'm sure the shadow/highlights button is in other programs, but may be elsewhere.

EXIF for this picture: Canon T2i with Tokina 100mm lens measured at 29mm, 1/200th sec, f4.6, ISO 100, external flash fired.