Amy at happythings has gone and inspired me again with amazing color and some fun tricks with Photoshop. When I saw the photos she had doctored in Photoshop, I just had to try this myself. And let me just say, this is so easy and so addicting — choosing (and limiting) which photos to use was the only hard part!

You can use these photos for so many different things — from wrapping paper to desktop backgrounds. Amy actually got the idea from a quilting magazine that suggested printing out these images onto fabric to make a quilt out of them. Cool!

Want to see how easy this is to do with your own images?

OK, find a photo where you like the color palette and crop it by selecting a very small row of your image with lots of different colors in it (make it around 10 pixels or so wide and the whole height of your image). Easy so far, right? Now for the last step. Yep, just two steps! Now resize your photo and make sure to click off “Constrain Proportions”. You will want to increase the width of your image from the previous 10 or so pixels to 800 or even more.

Below are some photos I’ve tweaked in their before and after states using those two easy steps. I think it is so fascinating to really get into your photos and notice some of the colors that you didn’t even realize were there. Like I said — this is perfect for creating palettes. I am quite fond of this new trick, if you can’t tell!

Farmer’s Market after (top of blog). Farmer’s Market before (directly above).

Manatee before.

Manatee after.

Oranges before.

Oranges after.

Big Bear sunset before.

Big Bear Sunset after.

And you can even do your images verticle! Here are a couple of my favorites…

Spring flowers before.

Spring flowers after.

Italian sea town from our honeymoon before.

Italian sea town after.

And just for fun . . .

Goofy baby in her party dress before.

Party dress after.

Now go out and create some cool palettes out of your own photographs. And if you figure out other cool uses for them, I’d love to hear your ideas!