This One's For You, Mom

Can you believe the nerve of that snowboarder – to come out of nowhere and plow down my mom like that? And to think, the thing my mom was most concerned about after he ran into her and broke her arm was that he had messed up her awesome ski jump. :)

Picture of Avagail Taylor Moore and her four older siblings

So, my Grandma has this picture of her mother (the youngest child in the photo), Avagail Taylor Moore, and Avagail’s older siblings: Dora Bell Taylor Blackburn Hunt, Charles Ephraim Taylor, and Orval Clell Taylor. The picture is kind of in rough shape with a rip across the front and quite a few spots that look to have been damaged by water, plus the photo was originally printed for one of those old antique oval frames – so the picture itself is not flat and could not be scanned on a flatbed scanner. Since it is the only picture I have ever seen of my great grandmother as a child, I thought it would be worth restoring. (Again, I love Photoshop!) So, I took a picture of the photo with our digital camera, then worked on that on the computer. Once I got it all cleaned up, I adjusted the color, and then I cropped a picture that just showed my great grandma, Avagail.

Editing a Photo

So, I usually do some minor editing to all of my photos after I take them – mostly removing red eye. But every once in a while I will have a photo of the boys that has great potential, so I will take the time to really edit it. I love Photoshop! Anyways, it is hard to get four little boys to all look at the camera at the same time, let alone all smile at once, and so I will often get a shot that is pretty good, but one boy is looking away or has his eyes closed or something. So I’ll take a similar shot from the same time and edit them together so I have one good photo of all the boys. When we went to pick out pumpkins the other night, I got these great shots of the boys, but when I got them onto the computer I realized that all of the shots were pretty good, but none of them had every boy looking at the camera or smiling. So I ended up taking four different photos and editing them together. And this is what I ended up with. (If you look closely at the fence in the background, you can tell that the picture has been edited, but who’s going to be looking that closely anyways?) I usually just edit two photos together, not four, so I ended up staying up late that night (after Michael fell asleep on the couch) and spending a lot more time on this than I probably should have, but I was pretty pleased with the end result.

Photoshop Problem -- Help!!!

I know of at least a few of my friends who use Photoshop, so I thought I’d throw this out there and see if any of you have any suggestions for me.

I use Photoshop Elements 4.0 and I’ve created a pretty large catalogue (almost 14,000 photos) in the Organizer. I have tried to backup the catalogue a few times, but have always run into a problem with backing up, so never did it, and now I am feeling a little nervous about not having a backup with so many photos – don’t want to loose all those hours of work I put into tagging all the photos. So, here’s the problem. When I click on file> backup> backup the catalog> next> continue, a little window pops up that shows 33%, then it goes to 66%, then sometime after that it freezes up and I have to Ctrl+Alt+Delete to get out of Photoshop.

I have posted this problem to the forum on the Adobe site and to another Photoshop forum, and none of the suggestions people have given me have helped so far. I have tried leaving the computer for a while to see if it might complete the backup if I give it enough time, but this hasn’t helped. So, if anyone has any suggestions for me, I would be willing to try just about anything at this point. Thanks!