Glorious Golden Fall

We did get out to see the aspen leaves up in the mountains on Saturday. While probably not at the full peak of color, it was still beautiful. Given how changeable the weather has been this year, when it was a sunny day with reasonable temperatures all of the leaf reports were saying that this was the weekend to go because they would probably peak in the middle of the week and the weather wasn’t going to be as nice then.

 
credits: Freestylin' Fall by Jessica Bolton at funkyplaygrounddesigns; Frayed Fabric Templates by Rachel Young at scrapartist; fonts: University Roman LET

Yesterday when we were out ogling the pretty yellow aspen leaves on the mountain sides, I of course took pictures of the kids. It was late afternoon and the sun was perfect for making the leaves glow their golden yellow colors, but not so good for getting nice expressions on the kids' faces since the sun was usually in their eyes- especially when there are 5 of them. For the first time I tried the 'photomerge group shot' function in PSE7, and I'm impressed!! It analyzes and lines up the multiple photos (I was only working with 2, but it says it can do up to 10) and then you choose the best one to start with as your base. Pick the next photo and draw over it with a brush on the areas that you want to put on the base photo. It analyzes the area you drew on, makes some sort of mask automatically for it and plops the extracted piece in the correct place on top of the base photo. If it didn't quite get it right, then you adjust the area it is to work with and it changes it in real time for you to proof again. Click done and it puts everything in a new psd document with layers so you could even do further editing if you wanted to. I'm sold. I will be using this again- don't know why I have waited nearly a year to try it out. No more excuses for pictures with 'ugly' faces of one or two kids if I have multiple photos to play with where there is at least one with a pretty face :)

Oh, and I tried the panorama function too- worked like a charm too. I had used this function in earlier versions of PSE and liked it pretty well. I  never could get it to work right in v6 for some reason, but they've got it straightened out in v7 and improved it a lot. You get a layered psd with actual masks in the end, and the merging is great.

Here are some more pretty fall photos for you to enjoy!
  (This first photo is the one I fixed up with the photomerge function BTW.)  
What’s up with the red leaves on the aspen tree? very unusual! Mark says he has seen that on another tree up on Barr Trail too.