Photo Preparation

At Mastercolor Labs we see thousands of different Christmas Cards each year, and every year we are asked "which picture should I use for my card."  My answer is always, use the photos that show what your family is like in their every day life.  Sure everyone wants to look like a Norman Rockwell Painting, but the cards I remember the most are the funny cards with kids laughing, dogs facing the other way, babies crying, and parents looking frustrated.  Remember you are sending these to friends, and they already know AND like you (hopefully), so be yourself.

It is the single most common mistake we see when new photo editors start playing with their images.  Let me start by saying " I don't blame them", whenever you bump up the contrast is makes your image burst of the monitor.  The adjustments to your new file will also "burst" off the page, literally.  One of the biggest short comings in this digital photo world we live in is that your printed matter will never match your monitor perfectly.

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Recently, I have started telling myself that I’m not old; thinking if I say it enough I will begin to believe it. So far, it hasn’t worked. Suddenly, for me, old age is not something over the hill anymore, it’s just around the corner and I’m wanting to head in the other direction. I don’t want to become my mother. I don’t want to have blue hair. I don’t want to drive slow and need to sit in a car seat to see over the steering wheel. Yet, things keep happening to me that make me feel as though it’s time to move to Florida and start swilling Metimucil.

I was in Colorado driving down a dirt road at about 35 miles per hour when one of the funniest things that’s ever happened to me occurred. I was visiting my daughter who was working as a wrangler at a Young Life camp. She had been telling me for days about how the moose would come in the afternoon and graze on camp property. I desperately wanted a picture of a moose. So, every afternoon, I’d show up at the field where they grazed and they didn’t show up.

"Charles, I am thinking of getting a new digital camera."  I hear this a lot from friends.  Other times  I have the chance to print an order that they have sent to us and I tell them " You need to get a new digital camera".  I guess since I am on the processing side of the photo industry some of my closest friends think I am a Camera expert, well the Camera experts are gone.  You can thank everyone's thrifty nickel for that.  You now are pretty much stuck buying it from a part time clerk at Walmart, or Costco, or trusting what you read from the discount houses online.

Ask anyone who knows me. I am not a gardener. As a matter of fact, I had to look up how to spell gardener for the blog. You will hear plants cry out when they see me coming because they know they’re doomed if I’m their caretaker. It isn’t that I’m a cruel person. I don’t mean to kill every living thing on my deck; I just need self-sufficient plants.

One of my favorite parts of owning a small business is having the chance to work with Friends.  I love having the chance to buy from my friends and I love the opportunity to supply to my friends.  A friendly face can make a difficult business decision that much easier.  My friend Joe Michel built this website 13 years ago.  Well at least he built the original, and since has reconstructed it many times to update our technology through his company, www.itworxonline.com.

It's good to know that for every dollar you spend on college tuition, your kids are going to have at least an hour of fun on it.   I will never forget the first time I saw one of the kids painted for a football or basketball game.    My first thought was, "Good Lord, I hope your grandparents don't see you on TV painted