Mobile Tutorial

August 20, 2016 by Kat

Creating an Interesting Profile Photo, Part 2

Love them or hate them, profile photos are now a way of life. You can hardly navigate the online world without having an avatar that shows who you are. And why would you want to? Sharing a photo of yourself as you participate online inspires trust and establishes you as a real human, ready to be yourself in both the real and online worlds. If you do it right, a profile photo can be an extension of your personality. A good one can be your own personal logo, making you instantly recognizable online.

So let’s make a good one, shall we? This week I’m sharing Part 2 of the Creating an Interesting Profile Photo tutorial, which steps you through the process I used to create my and my son’s new profile photos, shown below.

We pick up where Part 1 left off, so visit that part first to see where these images started.

Step 4 – Alter the Color

I wanted to add some geometric effects to the profile photos, and adding effects to a full color photo can be hit or miss. It is very easy to create visual mess with lots of color and lots of shapes, so going to a simpler color palette allows you more complexity in effects later.

I started the color alterations on Brandon’s by going black and white in an earlier step. In iColorama, I exaggerated the black and white, giving it a more graphic feel by increasing contrast and grain using an effect found under the Style > Hatch menu.

From there I altered the color using a preset under the Tone > Tint menu. Explore the blending mode options when using this menu. Screen blending mode worked best to tone the black and white in this case.

For my profile photo, I started with the color version and went straight into the Tone > Dutone menu. In this case, I didn’t change the Blend Mode but I did change the Opacity setting to 80%, letting a little bit of the original color come through so it was not a flat blue. In many iColorama menus there are a range of adjustment options like Blend Modes and Opacity. Experiment with these to get a custom look for your image.

Step 5 – Add effects

Now I’m ready for the fun part, adding effects! iColorama has a great range of geometric effects, which is what I wanted here to represent the “techie-ness” of my son, and myself too. That geeky engineering background needs to come through! You will want to choose your own effects based on your personality. Do you want to go painterly and soft? Are natural fibers and textures more your thing? Think about what you like to wear, the art you choose, the colors you gravitate to. It’s not only the photo, but the application of color and effects that make the profile photo represent you.

So… Geometric effects for me and Brandon. This is where I’m going to go into more detail, and share a great feature in iColorama: The Swatch.

All of the effects I used in these images are found under the Preset menu, either Grids or Shift. In Grids, you have a number of preset grid options you can overlay onto your image. When you first try out the Grid presets, you may notice the grid is a distracting black and it may cover important parts of the photo… Like your eyes and face. But there is a great range of adjustability in these Grids. Start with with Size and Feature sliders at the bottom to see what they do. In this case. The grid flips around to be where I want it – away from Brandon’s face – just by adjusting these sliders.

Once you have a grid where you want it, it’s time to change the color. Tap the Grid Color icon at the bottom of the screen, and another menu comes up to change the color. Tap “Swatch” in that menu to get to the color swatch.

This is the awesome feature… It creates a color swatch from the colors in your image, so you can match the color of the grid to the colors in your image. Now you can tap the different options to change the color of the grid and see what looks best with your photo. It makes a big difference to change from the basic black of the preset options to a color from the swatch. Look for the Swatch menu anywhere you see the Color icon. It may not be available in all menus and presets, but it’s worth it to check.

Here’s the sequence of added effects I used for Brandon’s photo, starting with Preset > Grid effect…

Then adding a Preset > Shift effect, again using the swatch to adjust the color…

And finally another Preset > Shift effect to add in the colored pixels…

For my image, it was a similar process using similar effects, although I wanted the vanishing lines on the right side of the photo instead of the left. Try as I might, none of the options in iColorama would allow me to rotate that effect to the opposite side, so I rotated my image instead. Here’s what it looked like coming out of that step:

Remember you have lots of tools that you can use interchangeably! Don’t get stuck thinking you have to work in a linear fashion in one app. Here’s the final application of geometric effects for my photo:

Step 6 – Finishing Touches

After adding the geometric effects, the images were almost done. Just a few finishing touches to close things off!

For Brandon’s photo, the right edge of his face got lost in some of the processing. No worries! I blended the final geometric version with the earlier black and white version in Image Blender, bringing back the structure of his face without losing the impact of the edit:

For me, I had a couple of things to do. First, I didn’t like the brighter spot of my hair in the upper left corner or the fact the pixels did not end neatly on the edge of the screen on the right side. So I took care of that with a crop in Snapseed.

Second, I didn’t like how my lips looked chapped. Anyone who is around me for even a short length of time knows I’m obsessive about applying Chapstick, so how did that happen? The roughness seemed to be highlighted by the color conversion, and I thought it was a distraction. (Not to mention, once I noticed it, I needed to apply Chapstick every time I saw the photo because it looked so uncomfortable! See? Obsessive.) So I used Retouch in Handy Photo and cleaned things up to even out the bright spots.

Voila! Finished photo… You will now see it everywhere on my social media streams. Fun!

Your turn!

So what do you think? Are you ready to try creating a more interesting profile photo for yourself? What colors and effects will you choose to represent your personality? It’s your turn to create a profile photo that shows the true you!

And for one lucky person, I will create a profile photo for you! Just leave a comment with what colors and effects would represent you this week, and I’ll randomly select one of the commenters to win. I’ll contact the winner via the email to get a starting photo. Should be fun!

August 11, 2016 by Kat

Creating an Interesting Profile Photo, Part 1

In early 2000, I started to get serious about learning photography. I got my first SLR (film!) and started playing around, taking classes and exploring my world with camera in hand. In 2001, my son arrived and gave more purpose to my photography. He was my primary subject, and experimenting with photographing him is a big part of my early development.

Until one day, when he was 6 or 7 years old, he said, “Mom, stop taking pictures of me!” To be honest, he hadn’t been a willing subject for a while, I was always bribing with cookies and other treats. But him voicing it so clearly meant I had to change. My days as the mammarazzi were over.

Even now that he’s a teenager he’s not very interested in being photographed. We’ve had fights about it. So when we were on vacation and I asked if he would let me take photographs of him looking out a train window, I was shocked to hear agreement. “I need a new profile photo,” he explained. So we took a few shots and he was done, off being silly with his cousin.

A couple of weeks later, he got his profile photo:

I got not only the joy of a willing subject in my son for a few minutes, but the fun of creating an interesting profile photo for him too. I liked it so much, I created a similar one for myself!

So I thought, why not share with you the steps to create an interesting profile photo for yourself? We use these images everywhere — Email, Facebook, Instragram, you name it — so they might as well be something you like. This tutorial will be in two parts, outlining the general steps and diving in on a deeper tutorial for one aspect in each part.

Step 1 – Choose the Photo

The starting photo should be one that really captures the personality of the subject, with good focus and exposure. You specifically want good lighting in the eyes, since that’s what a viewer will be drawn to first. The composition and background of the starting photo don’t have to be great, because we are going to be removing the subject from it. Here are the starting photos I used…

For my son, I have a series of photos of him looking out train windows, from the time he was about a year old. This overall photo is ok, could be better with some processing and a crop (and without that busy t-shirt), but I liked the light and expression on his face so that’s what I chose to use.

For mine, this selfie of me and my sister turned out great, but I needed to remove her (sorry sis!).

Step 2 – Remove unwanted elements

Now you need to get the subject isolated. There are a few ways you can do that:

Use the Move Me function in Handy Photo (tutorial here)
Use Masking in Superimpose
Use Masking in Image Blender (tutorial in Art with an iPhone)

Whatever the method, you are working to cleanly extract the subject from the surroundings. One note: If you have a subject with curly hair (like me and Brandon), you will just have to smooth it out in the masking. It’s nearly impossible to cleanly separate from a busy background.

You don’t have to be perfect with the edges, you can certainly see imperfections with these. We can address most of those in how we layer and adjust on the background, in the next step.

Step 3 – Compose on a Background

Now that we have our subject cut out, we need to layer on a neutral, square background in the desired composition. Why square? Because most profile photos are a square or a circle, so if we create a square image it can be used everywhere.

I do this layering in Image Blender, using the Arrange function (tutorial in Art with an iPhone). For a profile photo, you want it to be mostly face, so zoom way in. If the image ends up a little blurry because it’s so zoomed in, don’t worry. This is going to be a creative profile photo! It doesn’t have to be perfect.

For Brandon’s, I had converted the masked image to black and white before composing on the white background. You might not be able to see it, but there is a white background behind him.

For mine, I started with a white background as well, but realized as I started playing in the next steps that was too stark for what I wanted to do, so I experimented with layering on black and grey. The grey worked best.

That’s all great, Kat, you say. But where did you get these neutral backgrounds? Are they magically available on your iPhone? No, of course not! I created them. You can too. And that’s our in-depth tutorial for today…

Creating White, Black and Grey Backgrounds

To create all three backgrounds, you will need the ProCamera, Image Blender and Big Photo apps. If you don’t know how to use these apps, they are all explained in my book, Art with an iPhone, so check that out.

First you start by taking a white photo in ProCamera. That is not as easy as it sounds, because on automatic exposure settings, all cameras want to expose to a mid-tone grey. That means when you try to take a photo of something white, like a piece of paper, you get something darker than white as seen in the next screen shot. You have to manually tell the camera to overexpose the image. In ProCamera, you do that with exposure compensation.

Tap the exposure compensation icon indicated above, and pull the dial that appears on the bottom of the image all the way to the left, for maximum overexposure. You can see in the screen shot that the image on the screen is now full white. Take the photo, and you will have a fully white background on your camera roll.

Let’s not stop there, let’s create the grey and black backgrounds too. You do that using Image Blender. Load the white photo you created as both the bottom and top layers, and then select Difference blending mode. At 50% opacity, you will have a grey image. Save it.

At 100% opacity, you will have a black image. Save it.

Now you have solid white, grey and black background images on your camera roll. Awesome. The last step is to increase resolution of these images in Big Photo, so in later blending you end up with a high resolution file.

Tag these high res images as “Favorites” or add them to a “Backgrounds” album for easy access. You can crop them to square and have square versions at the ready too. I use these all the time!

Coming up in Part 2

Next week I’ll get into the creative processing steps for altering color and adding effects, and show you a really cool feature in iColorama. Stay tuned!

June 15, 2016 by Kat

Begin with a Background (Mobile Tutorial + Stackables Formula)

I’m already learning from my #30edits Abstract Challenge! Just what I was hoping would happen. And that, of course, means I have new things to share.

One of my early observations: The first step in any abstract edit is removing the connection to reality in the image.

Abstract Kat Sloma iPhone Photography

Turns out, that is harder to do than I realized! Our brains seem to want to make meaning out of the slightest texture and pattern, so removing that connection to reality requires some work. One way to do this is through blur of the image, which softens the lines and textures which provide a lot of information to our brain.

Today I’m sharing my favorite method for creating background blur using the Stackables app, using an image I shared last week in another post. I think this forest fern image was leading me toward my abstract project.

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I started with this forest image, which caught me eye due to the interesting repetition in the ferns and fir needles.

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In Stackables, you can add a blur layer by going to the Adjustments menu (top bar) and selecting the Blur effect (right menu). You can increase the blur by selecting Intensity (lower left), and then increasing the slider (bottom bar). Layer 6 in this iPad screen shot is the blur layer in the Stackables formula I’m sharing with you today.

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If you want to increase blur more than possible with a single layer, no problem. Just duplicate the layer. You can keep adding Blur layers to reach the desired effect. Increasing blur increases abstraction, by taking away the edges and textures of the object you photographed.

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The final image (here again) was created by blending the blurred background with some other fern images. It is not a full abstract, but you might be able to see how the original image comes through as a background layer.

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Now I have the Stackables Formula for you! This formula, called Bluish Blur, was used to create the fern background above. It shows you how you can use blur along with other Stackables layers to begin changing an image toward abstract. Have fun abstracting!

To download the “Bluish Blur” formula for your own use in the Stackables app, do the following:
1. Make sure the Stackables app is installed on your iOS device.
2. On your iOS device, download the formula file from this link. (This is a Dropbox link, and you may be prompted to save the file to your Dropbox account, if you have one. Go ahead and save it to your Dropbox and then download from there.)
3. When you go to download or open the file on your device, use “Open in…” and choose the “Open in Stackables” option.
4. Stackables will open and ask if you want to import the formula, tap “Import.”
5. To use the formula, load a photo, go to Formulas (1), choose Favorite Formulas (2). You will see the imported formula (3), so tap to preview. Click the wrench icon (4) to apply the formula and make changes to the layers.

April 27, 2016 by Kat

Spring Cleaning your Device

The change of seasons brings with it a natural opportunity to clean things up. As we rearrange our gear from cold season to warm, it’s easy to purge and organize. If I didn’t like something last year, I’m no longer attached. Away it goes.

But… What spurs us to clean off our devices? If you are like me, your device is a cluttered mess. All the apps you downloaded and never used. Music you haven’t listened to in years. Photos from six months ago (or longer). Other than my Camera Roll, I haven’t really ever cleaned things up since I started using the iPhone in 2012. I keep the home page organized, and page two after that. The rest? A disaster.

So this week, when my iPhone failed to update to latest version of iOS normally, I decided to not fight any longer to get it restored to its pre-update condition. After my lessons the last time this happened, my contacts were backed up. All of my photos were already archived on my computer or Dropbox. Resetting the device was a great opportunity to start from scratch and clean things up.

It took a little bit of time, but now, I only have the apps I actually use on my iPhone. Not only that, they are nicely organized into folders and I can find them. My camera roll is clear and ready for new photos. My podcasts and music are downloaded and ready to listen to. My wallpaper backgrounds have been changed, which is surprisingly refreshing. The whole device feels clean and fresh.

Have you cleaned off your device lately? If not, here are some suggestions:

Delete any apps you don’t use regularly. You can always download them again if you find you need them. I kept anything I use all the time, or have used in the last year in specific circumstances (like travel apps). I didn’t keep photo editing apps I rarely use or want to try out — those can stay on my iPad since I do most of my editing there. Only the apps I know I will use stayed.
Organize less-used apps into folders. There are apps you use all the time and want available to open with one tap, and then there are the apps you use once in awhile, where a couple of taps to navigate a folder won’t hurt. I find it easier to navigate and find apps with fewer pages on the device with more organized folders, than pages and pages of apps. Keep most used apps on the home page where you can easily get to them with a click of the home button, and move the rest to a secondary page.
Clear off your camera roll. Haven’t cleaned your photos off lately? Can you find anything? Archive and delete old photos to lighten the load. It makes it easier to find things! Your photo apps run better, too. Learn how to archive and delete here. Are there special photos you want to keep on your device? Learn how to create permanent albums here.
Change your wallpaper. It seems simple, but if you’ve had the same wallpaper for over a year, you might find this visually refreshing. For background wallpaper, something subtle with open area works well so it doesn’t distract from your app icons. For the lock screen, the image can be busier as long as you can read the date and time easily. Experiment! The iPhone changes color scheme depending on the background photo, so it’s a nice way to “redecorate.”
Update your notification settings. One of the biggest ways to clutter up the device visually is with notification badges. Not to mention it makes you feel like you are behind on everything! I’ve recently gone through and turned off badges for almost everything except phone and messaging. Lock screen notifications are limited to a few apps I want to hear from. Do I really need to know everytime I get a new email or someone likes a photo on Instagram? No! I’ll check in with the apps when I have time. I don’t need them nagging me.

There is nothing like a fresh, clean, organized room or closet or cabinet, is there? It’s the same with your digital spaces. Take a few minutes here or there to spring clean. If you do, I guarantee you will enjoy your device more!

April 1, 2016 by Kat

Castles on the Sand (A Mobile Tutorial)

Part of living a creative life is exploring new techniques and learning new tools. I’ve been doing more and more with an app called iColorama, an amazingly featured and versatile artistic app. This tutorial on how I created “Castles on the Sand” will give you an example of a few features you will find inside this app.

The image starts with a walk on the beach in Bandon. Our spring break trip was quite rainy, but we had some clear patches each day for a walk on this amazing beach. The tide was going out so the wet sand was perfect for reflections, and a storm was blowing in so there was this amazing light and sky.

My starting image is not perfect. It’s not even on focus! I’m not sure if I just missed getting the focus right (I can’t tell unless I have my reading glasses on, which I didn’t), or if it was blowing so hard I couldn’t hold the camera still (I do remember wind), but either way it’s out of focus. But the shapes, light, and reflections are perfect, so I thought…I’ll try a painterly look!

The first step of the edit was in Snapseed, to change the color tones to a more monochromatic look using a Vintage filter without the vignette. As much as I like iColorama for a lot of things, the color filters are not my favorite. I’ll usually start in Snapseed, Mextures or Stackables if I want to change the color tones.

Isn’t this a nice blue?

Next into iColorama. Since I’m going for a painterly look, I start with the Painterly filters, found in Style on the main menu. The way iColorama works, the main menu is always at the top. After you select a main menu, a submenu appears below it to scroll through, left to right. Look for available Presets in the bottom right, which will pop up effect options you can scroll through (top to bottom) if there are any available. In the bottom left, you will find an Opacity slider which allows you to reduce opacity and blend with the previous image if you want to reduce the intensity of a given effect.

This screen shot is from the iPad, which gives you a lot more room for all of these menus and options. The menus can be found in the same relative location on the screen with the iPhone version, but you don’t see as many options at a time and they will overlap the image. To close a pop up menu, like the Preset options on the right, just tap the Preset icon again. You can tell which menus and options are on at any given moment by the blue text and highlighting.

I liked the simplified edges of the Painterly 3 filter at 100% Opacity, shown here.

That was a good start, but I wanted more variation in the feel of the painted look so I decided to “paint” it myself, which you can do from the Brush menu. Unlike many painterly effects in apps which apply an effect to the whole image, in the iColorama Brush menu you actually get to paint!

Choose a type of Brush, I chose Bristle here, and then look at your options. There are different Presets, which in his case determine how much you smear color from one area to another, different brush shapes and other settings. You can change the color of your background canvas from white as well.

Along with the usual Opacity slider on the left, you can also change size and stroke opacity for your brush. There are so many options it can be overwhelming, so to get started stick with the defaults and play around. You know me, I’m all about learning from experimentation! A finished product doesn’t have to come out at the end.

As you get into this type of detailed brush work, you are going to want to zoom and pan to see exactly what is going on with your brushstrokes. You do that my tapping the Zoom Move option on the left of the window. When this option is highlighted, you can zoom in and out using two fingers and pan the image using one. When you are ready to brush again, just tap to turn off the Zoom Move menu.

You’ll also note on the left that you have a few undo options. Undo will remove the last stroke (unfortunately it doesn’t have a longer memory than the last stroke!), Erase will allow you to erase an area back to blank canvas, and Clean will revert the whole image back to blank canvas. Don’t you love digital painting? Can’t do any of that with real paint and canvas!

I played with a couple of options on this image. My first one left a bit of blank canvas in places, shown here.

I thought those bits of white were distracting even though I liked the variation they added, so in the end, I painted the whole image.

I still added variation through the stroke texture and color blending that happens in the painting process. You can see that better in an enlarged view.

I didn’t feel this was quite done yet, so I went back into the Style menu and played with more painterly options. I liked one of the Presets from the Water menu, which gave more contrast to the edges of the rock as well as color variation in the open spaces, but still brought through the stroke variation I had added in the prior painting step. It also brightened the color back up. And this felt done! Here is the final image again:

You are going to see me using this app more and more. I’ve had it forever and recommend it in my book, Art with an iPhone, but didn’t start using it regularly until #30edits pushed me out of my comfort zone. I’ve barely scratched the surface of what it can do. As I continue to learn, I will share with you. I’d love to see what you do with it!

March 8, 2016 by Kat

Campus Colors (New Stackables Formula)

It was back to school for me last week, attending a week of training at the Stanford Graduate School of Business. I had a bit of time over the weekend to do a photo walk on campus and found some fantastic scenes which have given me a week’s worth of inspiration.

I loved the warm tones in the buildings on the Stanford campus, so I created a new formula in Stackables called Campus Colors to really bring out these tones. Starting each edit with the formula, I removed or adjusted layers depending on what the image seemed to need. Less texture? Stronger color? All adjustable. You can find the link and instructions for installing the Campus Colors formula at the end of this post. Enjoy Stanford!

There were many lovely places to sit on campus…

Oh, that blue chair! What a find. It was sitting outside the Biological Sciences building.

And more benches… You are never at a loss for a place to sit on this campus!

Great bicycles, good colors, fantastic texture… what could be better?

Another great find! The break area outside of a lab. I don’t think they expect any visitors to wander by this little corner of campus. I loved it!

To download the “Campus Colors” formula for your own use in the Stackables app, do the following:
1. Make sure the Stackables app is installed on your iOS device.
2. On your iOS device, download the formula file from this link. (This is a Dropbox link, and you may be prompted to save the file to your Dropbox account, if you have one. Go ahead and save it to your Dropbox and then download from there.)
3. When you go to download or open the file on your device, use “Open in…” and choose the “Open in Stackables” option.
4. Stackables will open and ask if you want to import the formula, tap “Import.”
5. To use the formula, load a photo, go to Formulas (1), choose Favorite Formulas (2). You will see the imported formula (3), so tap to preview. Click the wrench icon (4) to apply the formula and make changes to the layers.