How YOU doin'? Photoshop slimming trick

There are few easier tricks I've learned than this simple slimming and trimming step. It can be found in Scott Kelby's The Photoshop CS2 Book for Photographers. You must have your photo ready to begin which means you've done all the work on it to get it to look its best. For help with your technique, I suggest you visit The Pioneer Woman site and click on Photography. From there, you can visit Donna Boucher's site as well. She's listed on the right hand bar as a contributor.

And now I'd like to introduce you to my model.

The Handsome Handyman you see here is my brother-in-law, JAY. You remember me telling you about him, right? Chuck Norris came to the wedding of he and my sister, Ginny. I haven't asked Jay if I could use his picture, but I'm so sure he won't mind that I'm just going to run with it. He's ready to lose a quick few pounds (not that he needs to, mind you) and he seems excited to begin. So here we go.

STEP ONE: Open up the photo you want to use and make a duplicate copy of it. It's helpful to make some off the gray canvas area visible, so expand your image window a little bit by click-and-dagging its bottom-right corner outward. Then press Command A (PC: Control-A) to put a selection around the entire photo. Then press Command-T (PC: Control-T) to bring up the Free Transform function.

STEP TWO: Grab the left-center handle and drag it horizontally toward the right to slim the subject. The farther you drag, the slimmer the person becomes. How far is too far? Look at the width field in the Options Bar for a guide ~ you're pretty safe to drag inward to around 95% (or even 94.7%) without getting caught (looking too obvious).

STEP THREE: When your person looks "naturally" slimmer, press Return (PC: Enter) to lock in your transformation. Doing this transformation leaves you with some excess white area on the left side of the photo; so with your image's selection border still in place (from Step 1), go under the Image menu and choose Crop to remove the white space. Press Command-D (PC: Control-D) to get rid of the dancing dashes and you're done!

Your subject will instantly look about 10-15

pounds slimmer. The original photo is on the top and the trim photo is underneath. So, try this trick and see how it works on your photos!

For those who don't use Photoshop or care about any of this, I apologize for this post. And for everyone else that does, I'm just trying to spread the joy that comes from a simple little trick. I tend to get excited about little things like that.

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