Thrilled. Excited. And "wasting time".

Went to one of my favorite blogs, followed one of her links, followed one of their links, then followed a link of theirs and came across...Pioneer Woman...who mentioned something I had never heard of, nor bothered to look up yet. Photoshop ACTIONS. LOOOOOOOOOve them!!!!! So I googled for more and then opened up my Photoshop CS (sorry for all of you who don't own PS because this means almost nothing to you...but it thrilled me...and I kicked myself for not googling PS tutorials etc., before...) and got to work. As Pioneer Woman often states "I could be doing laundry, or trying out [insert action name]...laundry can wait." Now don't worry, I won't go nuts and get off my weekly routine. Much. But this is fun stuff! I'll show you in a minute, (although PW does a great job) but let me explain. When you take a picture and upload it to your computer and put it into, say, Picassa, and "fix and edit" it, they are using "actions". It's a series of things you do in PS to get a desired result. Well...there are a million actions out there for sale, some for free, and if you know what you want a picture to look like, you can use an action and it goes way fast. For example:

Here is a picture I fiddled with, SOOC (straight out of camera):

First I added an action called "Soft & Faded":

Next I used "Fresh & Colorful" (for a smidge more color):

And I finished it up with "Boost", but took away one layer of crispness:

Isn't that so cool?? I love it!! It's got a cool vintagy look going on. I could fiddle allllll day with these. Not good. (for example, right now I'm putting off vaccuuming so I can bore you with my discovery)
Oh...and how happy for you...this is another one of our (fabulous) family shots recently taken...revealed in a few different looks.
Now. Back to vaccuuming.