I have been loving the recent change of season. Autumn is one of my favorite times of year. It’s the combination of light, color, and emerging bare branches which inspire me creatively. It’s been fun to get back into editing and experiment with a few new techniques, so it’s time to share a Mobile Tutorial from a recent edit.

I created this piece, “On the Other Side,” yesterday morning and it’s the perfect candidate. I was looking to see how abstract I could go and still retain the feel of the light on leaves. I like the balance of contrast, color and abstraction I was able to achieve in the final piece.

Here is how I created it…

I started with an image captured in ProCamera with the iPhone 6s. (If you missed it, see my first impressions of the iPhone 6s here.) I composed for the lines of the main branches, knowing I could eliminate the branches from the tree behind in post processing.

My first step in post-processing is eliminating those extra tree branches using Handy Photo.

Next step is start altering color and effects. The colors are just too… real. I altered the color using the Tone effects in iColorama. This is an amazingly full-featured app that I am trying to use more. You can get lost in it, there are so many effects and options.

Continuing with artistic effects in iColorama, I experimented with different effects and ended up here:

I liked the shapes and the smearing of the color, but this has gone too abstract. You can no longer tell what it is. Time to reign it back in by blending with other images. To create some alternate images for blending, I started with Autopainter, one of my go-to artistic apps, on the toned image from iColorama:

And also ran the toned image through Autopainter II, for the chalk effect:

Now it’s on to blending using Image Blender. First, the iColorama output with the Autopainter output:

And then with the Autopainter II output:

It’s getting there. There are several problems I need to fix:
– The leaves are still too abstract, so I want to add some shape to them.
– The color is too blue-purple, so I want more warmth.
– The bottom open area of the image is too patchy, with some abrupt transitions, so I want to fill it in a bit.

I can solve the first problem, the abstraction, by blending the image back with one of the original photographs to add the structure of the leaves. Then, I can use color filters and textures to shift the color and fill in the open area. To do this I used a couple of texture apps in sequence. First, textures in XnView Photo FX. You can see how the color has started to shift and the texture has evened out the background.

And finally, with Radiance and Grunge layers in Mextures, adding further texture and shifting color to achieve the final state:

I just love the transformation you can create with a few apps on a photograph. It’s magical!

If you would like to learn more, you can preorder my book on Amazon, Art with an iPhone: A Photographer’s Guide to Creating Altered Realities. It includes information on these and other apps, tips on blending, and much, much more. Thanks for your support to make the book a success!