A little PSE fun today!

This weekend was my son's last weekend for school. every year there is a "Junior Ring Ceremony" held at St. James Chapel on the campus. This ceremony is when the Juniors receive their class ring. A senior presents the junior with his ring, and then the junior turns his ring around to signify the end of his senior year and the beginning of the senior year for the current juniors. So........Kyle is now "officially" a senior!

After the ceremony was over there was completed, several of the juniors hurried to "Senior Circle". This is the lawn area in front of the barracks buildings. There is a gazebo in the center of the circle, and there have been stone paths laid from four different directions to the center. Underclassmen are, under NO circumstances, allowed in this circle; it is for seniors only, and something that each and every underclassmen understands from the first day they set foot on campus.

I clicked a photo of Kyle at the gazebo that I just love - it shows his beautiful smile, and his face is beaming with happiness. It is as if I managed to catch the true feeling he had of becoming an "official" senior. I'm certainly not a pro photographer, so when I come home and see that shot that captured him best, I am thrilled!!

Because of the hype of the circle, others were present taking photos and I had to do some editing to make my pride and joy the focal point of this picture. I used Photoshop Elements 8 to work some magic. I outlined Kyle using my Polygonal Lasso Tool, and then "copied via layer" under the Layers Menu. I then hid the other layer and clicked over to the "Quick Edit" mode to brighten his cutout image a little bit.
Back to "Full Edit" mode, I showed all layers again, making sure that the cutout highlighted image was the top layer. I then hid the cutout image, went back to "Quick Edit" and darkened the bottom layer a little. (The goal for me here was to create more of a contrast between the background and Kyle). Once the layer was darkened to my liking, I went back to full edit, and while still working on the background layer, I chose the Gaussian Blur effect. This created a blurred, darker image for the background. I then flattened my image to the photo you see here! I can't wait to work on the scrapbook layout with this. I think I'll make it a 5x7, and after adding it to the other pictures, this will make a nice double page layout. :)