Making friends with Photoshop

So, I have been a proud Photoshop owner for over 2 years now, but {shame} I have never used it to actually edit photos until recently. Weird, huh? I used Photoshop for designing things (not that I'm much of a designer), but I'm just starting to actually learn how to use it. I'm loving it, though! Here's what I've done so far:

My first head swap
What do you do when you have these two pictures, taken of The Mr and I while we were dating, and in each of the pictures only one of you is looking at the camera? Swap the heads, of course!

 I took The Mr's head from the photo on the right and stuck in on Mr's body on the left to get this:

Perfection!

First success at cloning and patching

I snapped the cutest picture of The Mr. and Pudge at the school carnival a couple weeks ago. The only problem? Pudge's dark blue zipper pull was sticking up right in front of his cute grin. So, I used the clone stamp to re-create his mouth and then the patch tool to get the skin around is mouth the right shade. Sadly, I saved over the original version, so I can't show you the before and after, only the after. It's not exactly perfect, but it's close enough for me. :)

Aren't my boys just the handsomest? 

This was just before The Mr. nearly went in to cardiac arrest from being dunked repeatedly in a very cold dunking tank. I dunked him twice myself. :)

I am loving learning how to truly use Photoshop, and I can't wait to turn my newfound skills on some old family photos and start restoring them to their original glory. :)

For those of you who don't have Photoshop and want to try your hand at editing photos, try pixlr. It's a web-based advanced photo editor that does essentially everything that Photoshop does. And Debra at Housewife Eclectic shows you how to perform some basic fixes using pixlr as part of her Photo Thursdays. And she takes requests, so just ask and she can impart of her great knowledge. Trust me, she's amazing. {And no, she didn't pay or even ask me to say this. This shameless plug is all my own!}