Oh WHERE is my Airbrush?

Those of you who are fellow Larry-Lovers will get my title allusion ;)

Shameless Veggie Tales obsession aside. . . I talked earlier this week about the projects that have been keeping me busy as the holiday season creeps up on us. One of these projects is a photo book for Abbey entitled "My Baby Brother and Me" so that Abbey can read the story of her brother from my pregnancy until today. She LOVES stories, so I think she'll really love this!

It's going to be lovely, and I'm making it totally FREE using a coupon code that I have for Shutterfly photo printing online. (I'm getting free shipping, too, thanks to the opportunity I got to host my very own Shutterfly House Party). Here's a preview of what I'm working on:

But to the POINT. You're probably wondering what the heck my post title is about. Well, while compiling all of the pictures that I wanted to use for the photo book. I ran into a few pictures where I needed to edit out imperfections. Thus, I dabbled in using the airbrush tool in GIMP for the very first time ever. The following example is my very first attempt (and I think, success) at using an airbrush tool to correct an image. I had taken an adorable picture of Joe, but he had smacked his face into a toy earlier in the day, and had all these red marks all over is nose and forehead (poor little dude!)

So, I took out the redness and made it look like he hadn't smacked his head into anything before taking an adorable picture. I'm a novice at photo-editing. I'd consider myself a self-taught-apprentice at best. It took me a bit of trial and error before I got it right, but once I established a technique for making the airbrushing look natural, it started to appear that my efforts would be fruitful!

I ended up using a combination of airbrushing using the color-picker tool (that little dropper looking thing) to grab the colors around the tip of his nose one by one. I used the smudge tool (that would be the one that looks like a finger) in between. I think I did about 8-10 passes of this technique before I was satisfied with the result. I did the same (a lot faster) for his forehead. Obviously, this is not a tutorial, but after I did it on my own, I looked up how to actually do it. . . and I did pretty much exactly what is suggested in the tutorials on the subject. So, cool!

So, my photography mavens. . . I know you're out there reading this. How did I do?

And I KNOW you are totally singing "Oh WHERE is my airbrush" in your head now. Your welcome ;)