You are about to get really tired of my face.

Last night, around midnight, when I just could not study for the life of me, I decided I would change all of my profile pictures. On my Typepad profile, blogger, twitter, flickr, and Scrapinstyle. And as I was doing this, I remembered that some of you (on flickr and here) have been asking about about the processing of my photos.

So I decided to do a little tutorial on profile pictures! haha Can you tell I'm avoiding work for finals week?
This post is rather heavy laden with pictures... so you may want to click on the title of this post, so that your computer won't die trying to load all the posts on the blog.

My words are somewhat short and sweet. Profile pictures are often people's first impressions of you (online, that is!). So make your picture say something about yourself. Mine often changes with my moods. Silly, serious, kind, melancholy. Whatever. But it should reflect your personality. And I think that the processing you use also reflects personality. So I use actions.
Makes my life easy.
I use free ones.
Which makes it easier on my wallet,
although there are professional ones that I am dying to have.
You really have to wade through all the crappy photoshop actions before stumbling one ones that suite your tastes. But I'm going to share with you my favorite one of all. The series of photoshop actions that I use on about 80 percent of all my photos that I post here on this blog.

To show you how the actions work, here is a series of steps that the computer will do FOR you with the click of a button. I found them here.

My original non photoshopped (I love that that's an adjective!) photo:

I first cropped the photo and brightened it a bit before using the action.

And this is totally unnecessary, and I'm probably boring you non-Photoshop users, but I love seeing the steps of what happens with the action:

I love seeing the process.
Also, people have been asking about a quick and easy way to round the corners of your photos. This is about the easiest it gets, people!

Here are a few photos to help you out:

Step One:

Step Two: (right click)

Step Three:

Step Four:

Step Five: (right click)

Last Step!

Alright. So now none of you want to look at me again for quite some that. I understand that. It's okay. But I'll be back tomorrow with more holiday decor ideas. :)

Comments

[rachael]

I love this post i have been wondering how you edit forever, and i appreciate you sharing with us! I was up until really late last night messing around with actions! I have a questions, how do you get our photos rounded around the corners?

[Rachel Denbow]

Two Rachels in a row.

Um, I've been avoiding Photoshop for a year now because I am so intimidated by it. And I hate learning new techy things even though I know its the only way to move forward.

So, BIG THANKS FOR THIS TUTORIAL!

[Michelle Clement]

Dude...thanks for the link to those actions! I've yet to find some awesome free ones...:) Hope all is well, and I can't wait to see some holiday decor from you! Yay!