Archives for August 2016

August 25, 2016 by Kat

Back to the Forest

Summer in Oregon is awesome. After what is often a long, gray winter, the feel of the sun on my face and the ground under my bare feet is delicious. I love being warm enough to lose the sweaters and socks for a while. I love the long days of sunshine, the morning hikes with my dog, open windows at night. All of it.

But there is a downside to Summer. It also continues to be a challenge for me creatively. I’m all over the place. My bare trees are gone, I don’t have a focus. I don’t have anything that brings my work together. I experiment, and this year, nothing is sticking. So I’m back to the forest for a while, back to the trees.

There are multiple reasons I like trees as a subject so much, but this summer I’ve realized a really important one — these images fit my creative process.

When I made the decision to stop the abstract project, I thought I would continue with the figurative work. But it hasn’t happened, even though I have tons of conceptual ideas in my head and on paper. Why??

The challenge, I’ve found, is the advance planning these types of images take. If I have a concept, I can’t just sit down and create whenever it comes to me. I have to go around collecting the imagery I want to use in that concept. That takes time and energy. It was easier to do on vacation, where I had lots of free time and people around to model. I typically don’t have this kind of random imagery that works for the figurative work on my camera roll. So what I’ve been finding is that when I have time to sit down and create, typically early mornings, I can’t create that work unless I’ve planned ahead.

It turns out, I don’t like planning ahead in my art. I like to capture images as I move through my day, and then play with them later. Images of things that catch my eye, where I can stop and play with composition for a few moments as I capture a photo. They aren’t images of things so much as images of light and lines. It’s the interesting lines I like to photograph. They are the inspiration. Ten minutes of photo play can sometimes fuel my mornings for a week, maybe more.

Because my art is not just about creating a finished piece of a concept. It’s also about meditation. It’s my own personal escape into a quiet space that takes my mind away from everything else going on in my life. Playing with the image, a single image, and seeing what I can do with it brings its own unique joy.

The process of creating is more important than the finished piece.

I recently listened to a great podcast by Malcom Gladwell (Revision History Episode 7, Hallelujah) where he talks about different kinds of creators. There are those who have a concept and do things all at once, and then there are those who don’t have a concept in mind but eventually reach completion through experiment and revision. I’m the latter. It takes longer, but it’s the way that works for me.

So the trees are back. Not just because they are easier, because I certainly don’t believe art should always be easy, but because creating this way makes me happy. I need these morning moments of quiet and clarity in my life right now more than I need to create boundary-pushing art. So this is what I will do, what I will create.

What works for you? Are you a conceptual creator or an experimental creator? What matters more to you, the completed piece or the process? Think about it, and allow yourself to be true to the right process for you.

PS – Don’t miss out on the chance for me to create you a new profile photo! Read more here.

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!

Archives for August 2016

Upcoming Events