When we were first married, we regularly perused garage sales and secondhand stores for furniture, vintage items, and children’s books (which I collected before we even had children). One of my early purchases was a Mother’s Encyclopedia from the 1940s; I liked how it looked in my kitchen with my recipe box, and I thought it funny that there would be an encyclopedia just for mothers. Unfortunately, the last volume was missing, so there was no chance I would ever learn everything a mother needed to know!
Today, my daughter and I had a long phone discussion about discipline techniques for her three year old son. It seems like yesterday that I was working on improving HER behavior! Well, she turned out great and is a fantastic parent, but parenting is as challenging as ever.
When my children were small, I read books by Dr. Brazelton and Rudolph Dreikurs instead of the Mother’s Encyclopedia, but the little set of books has remained in my kitchen all these years. Today, I photographed them and used some of the techniques I have been learning in Kim Klassen’s Photoshop Essentials class to edit the photo (including the textures canvasback magic, not too shabby, and frame it). I experimented with using curves on just part of the image, decreasing saturation on a selection, and, of course, textures and layer masks.
melinda anderson photography 
This has such a wonderful vintage look and feel. The techniques you’re using are very subtle but very effective.
This photo really speaks to me. Brings to mind all things lovely and sentimental about mothering.
How is it that I have never noticed these books in your house before? I can’t wait to look inside one of them!
Geeze, so what you’re saying are all the answers are in that last missing book! Go figure! If only it was that easy. The photograph looks great, I too really enjoy playing around with Kim’s textures and her classes are so informative.